Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in Christy's LiveJournal:

Friday, July 17th, 2009
11:41 am	ranting about words So two hours ago I'd read something about the Iphone app publisher Tapulous, where it's mentioned that by raising the priceof a game from $0 to $.99 the install rates dropped by 95 percent. That seemed like a pretty extreme drop off to me for what is basically pocket change, but then I got to work and I forgot about it until just now reading something called the Penny Gap , where the gap between paying $0 and $0.01 basically defies macroeconomic theory, because it describes a demand curve that is basically nonlinear. So I think that's pretty interesting and keep reading until I get to: "I wanted to be sure I was clear on one point. I am not advocating the death of premium services. Nor am I stating that "free" is the penultimate business model. " ARRRRRRRGH stopstopstopstopit penultimate does not mean "Rilly Rilly Rilly Like Super-Ultimate." I can't read any more now because I can't take this person seriously.  I gave up on a podcast a couple weeks ago where they decided that infamous meant "Rilly Super-Famous".  I need professional help. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, February 18th, 2009
8:52 am	free legal advice Jim came home from Employment Law class last night with a piece of wisdom which I'll share: If you are going to say stupid (i.e. actionable) stuff about an employee, don't do it over corporate e-mail. (Comment on this)
Tuesday, February 17th, 2009
5:16 pm	What I did today What I did today: I picked up Jim's birthday cake from the cake people. He is 42 and the girl at Izzy's seemed somewhat confused. (6 Comments |Comment on this)
Saturday, December 1st, 2007
8:43 am	It begins. Having just gone to the store up the street for my obligatory caffeine shot, I see that Death Flurries 2007 are well underway. This is exciting stuff, as evidenced by the several days of buildup in the local media. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, November 10th, 2007
1:07 pm	What a day this has been. What a rare mood I'm in. So, I knew Saturday was off to a roaring start when at 10 AM I was standing at my front door engaged in conversation with Jehovah's Witnesses on the veracity of the Bible.  "Engaged" would be an overstatement, and anyway, as soon as I saw the copies of the Watchtower, I cranked the normally-submerged Kentucky accent -way- the hell up, because sometimes, with evangelists, it helps shorten the conversation because they figure I'm on their team.  What I told Jim I wanted to say, when this whole Scientific Factual Inerrancy bit came up, is hey, does it really matter?  Seriously?  I never understand this, and never understood it back when I was a practicing Baptist.  The parts of the religion that -matter- have basically nothing to do with whether or not the universe was created in six days or whether the Flood happened, or the Resurrection was literal, and for some reason this is the stuff that evangelical Christians seem to really want to focus on.  It's never anything practical like, will meditating on this stuff give me a sense of purpose or make me a better person or more humble or anything like that.  Which I would think would be a lot more relevant in a person's daily life than whether evolution is just a theory.  But OK, here we go, and now I have my own special pamphlet describing how a book written over a 1500 year period is error-free.  Including the Gospels which were written some 50 years after the fact and not by the apostles they're named after, and including the fact that the whole thing had to get reviewed by the Council of Nice who may possibly have had ulterior motives.  But enough on that. So then an hour later I go to my guitar lesson which is held in a small practice room in a guitar shop.  It's fairly typical to have a half-dozen people noodling around on the guitars in the shop and generally making it hard to hear without closing the door of the room which makes it stuffy.  I mention this whole JW interlude to the instructor, who says that his wife always deals with the Mormons because she likes to yell at them.  He also said that when someone asks if he has a personal relationship with Jesus, he says, "Oh, yeah, I think I know the dude.  Skinny middle eastern guy, with a beard?  Walks around in sandals a lot?"  So after more of this back and forth while tuning up, I notice the whole area next to the guitars by the practice room, which had some half dozen people twanging away five minutes earlier, plus a guy with his kid, is completely cleared out.  Which I have never seen happen in the whole time I've been there.  I really wasn't trying to be insensitive or irreverent, but I do believe I managed to clear out the room that way.   Current Mood: amused (Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 17th, 2007
12:42 pm	Recruiter email Dear , I need a 7-10 yrs profile. Local guy is must and should. After the telephonic, F2F must and Should. Java with OOAD, Web Sphere, Rational Rose, UML, Servlets, Struts, EJB. XML, UML, Use Cases, System Level application.. Oracle. Technical skills below Java, Oracle, Has designed, developed and maintained enterprise software Has worked in agile/iterative development environment Experience in all phases of product lifecycle Experience with distributed systems/service-oriented architecture Experience in complexity reduction Experience with software profiling / optimizing Experience with UML & XML ---- The following company has expressed an interest in viewing your confidential data: Dynamic Software Consultants 1300 W. Walnut Hill Lane Suite #252 Irving,TX 75038 bhisma@dsc-usa.com -------- ENGLISH, MOTHERFUCKER.  DO YOU SPEAK IT? (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, October 16th, 2007
8:27 pm	What would Kubrick do? So, in the ongoing battle behind this wet-behind-the-ears ooh-look-new-technology-shiny-shiny fanboy and my division at work, the golden boy is going to teach us how to build a build. Now, his build process is a lot faster than ours, but it gives incorrect results about half of the time. This doesn't really impress my coworkers for obvious reasons, but he's decided that the problem is a "training issue" which is a euphemism for "the end user is dumber'n a box of rocks and needs Special Help".  This end user was building software back when the Unix "make" command was the only game in town, but that's not important right now.  Anyhoo, he's going to lecture to us for an hour on how to do things The Right Way.   I predict carnage when he starts copping attitude with the guy who's about twenty years his senior. The conference room chosen is the one known as the War Room. So now I have to spend an HOUR resisting the urge to say, "Gentlemen, you can't fight in here!  This is the War Room!"  This will not end well. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Tuesday, September 25th, 2007
9:20 pm	make it stop. So, the final class for my masters degree is Technical Communication.  A couple oral presos which are to be videotaped and critiqued, a 10 page paper, a midterm, a final. So far, it is light -n- fluffy. Last week was a meeting in the library to convey to us what the resources of the library are, and what is meant by a "peer reviewed journal". This week, was a punctuation-fest in class, followed by a trip to the library to research what is meant by MLA versus APA citations and to try to find an example of each.  Working in groups.  At one point we also had an editing exercise wherein I had to tell people what "passive voice" is and what a preposition is.  If I were paying for this, and not my employer, I would no doubt be pissed.   As is, I need the oral presentation experience and I am endeavoring to be Zen about the whole thing. Current Mood: amused (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, September 21st, 2007
5:36 pm	heard on the radio between songs. "Yeah, I'm painting my daughter's room, it's going to be pink and have a princess theme, so can you play House of the Rising Sun and keep my spirits up?" "OK, sure.  I'm going to try not to think about you fixing up your little girl's room and asking me to play a song about a whorehouse.  I'm just gonna play The Animals for you. Current Mood: disturbed (Comment on this)
Thursday, September 20th, 2007
4:57 pm	Why Johnny, I mean Management, can't write This in an email from my boss: Team, Below are some great comments from [CEO].  Please review and promote in the socialization of this directive- do I hear cheering? This is part of the attached email from his boss: "I am convinced we need to accelerate the process of organizational change as it regards quality and we need to see a significant change in our approach as a team in order to see improvements in quality anytime soon. " ----------- OK.  Here's what I don't understand.  It takes twice as much effort to misuse the language in this fashion.  It takes twice as long.  It makes less sense and often it sounds less decisive.  Why, then, does management persist in doing it?  I've read some pretty convoluted language - you'll see all sorts of subordinate-clause and passive-voice abuse as a German minor.  But Kafka at least was readable.  In the above exchange I don't even have any idea what they're trying to say.  Not for lack of trying, either.  I thought management was supposed to be better with the communication skills than engineers, but apparently not. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Friday, September 7th, 2007
10:40 am	Fluffy article gets sort of interesting halfway through http://warner.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/09/06/slummy-yummy-or-dummy They now all have children who are in the equivalent of middle and high school – far past the golden period of parental leaves and charming preschools that I remember from my time living among them. They’re facing an increased gap between the very best public schools and the mediocre mass. They’re seeing an increased tendency (in government-subsidized private schools) to kick out kids who don’t perform well enough to guarantee the school a 100 percent success rate on the baccalaureate exams. There’s an increased sense of urgency to get into the very best colleges; there’s a sense that only top-level math and science studies can lead to admission to the best colleges; there’s a sense that the job market is being flooded by young talent from China, India and the rest of Europe; a sense that the fruits of success are being distributed more and more narrowly, that the gap between the rich and everyone else is being dug more and more deeply and that you have to do absolutely everything you can, from the earliest possible age, to guarantee your child a slice of the shrinking pie of prosperity. ...Even vacation – always so precious – has now been compromised. By kids sitting at the dining room table doing remedial math. Or heading back early to attend pre-term class prep. Or taking off for an intensive language program or to meet a learning “coach,” or for a last-ditch attempt to find a place in a new school after all the neighborhood schools said no. This is nominally about parenthood in France not being nearly as idyllic as the public perception (and this is in one of the few European countries with anything like a pro-work-life-balance government policy), but it doesn't take a whole lot of imagination to extend it to nonparenthood.  What I find interesting/disturbing about all this, is that even in supposedly stop-and-smell-the-flowers 35-hour-work-week France, the middle class is not immune to the obsession, starting in preadolescence, with getting into the right schools, making the right career choices, just to keep your head above water, and that if you somehow screw this up, you are doomed.  I had thought this was mostly an American problem, but I suppose not. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, September 5th, 2007
8:25 pm	school Having been on the campuses of St Thomas and the University of Minnesota this year, I was at the UM this evening and the difference between the two schools feels almost palpable.  I think it's because of that big semipedestrian quadrangle.  Must be a Big Ten thing.  If I walk through St Thomas, I see parking lots and one cool building with stained glass.  I walk through the UM, I see cheap eateries, I see people playing Frisbee and rollerblading and I can see why people get stuck in academia.  This is probably a dangerous mindset for me considering my general attitude viz. my job this month. This probably also had something to do with spending an evening looking at mathy definitions and proofs.  I miss that.  I love my dead gay episilon. Current Mood: nostalgic (4 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, August 26th, 2007
2:07 pm	From this month's Bicycling Magazine "In addition to regular exercise, those who performed more non-exercise physical activity, including riding a bike for transportation, reduced their risk of early death by anywhere from 20 to 50 percent." There you have it, kids.  Riding a bike for transportation is "non-exercise physical activity".  Squeeze your ass into some Spandex or it doesn't count. (3 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, July 12th, 2007
10:53 pm	I meant to rant about this and I forgot So, we're in Chicago last week, and I'm reading the Tribune two days in a row, because I'm an idiot. It seems that some article in Science, it is determined that women don't talk as much more than men as was previously thought (roughly 16k words daily each, the difference is around 500 words or so) and apparently this has two different Trib editorialists all hot on bothered on two consecutive days, because, jeez, this couldn't possibly be the case because women just prattle on and on. Aside from the fact that I find it offensive (along with the usual commentary that men talk about "things" and women talk about "people" - yes, I realize that having a rack means I spend my time obsessed with Paris Hilton and this is what women DO) - what I find really interesting is that Science goes to the trouble of explaining their methodology, and not one but two columnists - both male, of course - want to go on about how This Can't Be Right, because Women Never Stop Talking, OH EM GEE!!!!!  Because apparently research is null and void unless it confirms what you "know".  There's a rant in here about creationism here somewhere, probably, and I do find it interesting that any flaws in the methodology are not mentioned. I could also go on a really long rant about the male/female ratio in upper management and the fact that people who chair meetings are going to tend to talk more, but I just don't have the words. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Saturday, May 19th, 2007
7:26 pm	I wish the silent majority would just shut up. So I'm in a meeting last week and I'm sitting across from three people in clashing shades of red. This is a little unusual and I comment on it. It is then explained to me that if you know someone deployed in the Gulf, you're supposed to wear red. I resist the very strong urge to agree that after all, this is literally the least they could do. I then read some more about this "Red Friday" thing. It seems that you can show your support for US Soldiers in Iraq (and elsewhere) by wearing red. You can also wear red to show your opposition to US military policy, anti-freedom policy, etc. etc. This is AWESOME. Two separate instances of slacktivism, almost mutually exclusive, with the same clothing requirement. This is flippin' ridiculous. I have to take a stand right away which I will do as soon as I figure out what's opposite red on the color wheel. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, December 3rd, 2006
6:37 pm	Sage advice If you find yourself faced with a homeowner type problem, and you go to the garage to get the appropriate tools for the job, and you come out of the garage with the sledgehammer and the hatchet, it may be time to sit down for a minute and rethink your strategy. (Comment on this)
Wednesday, October 18th, 2006
12:30 pm	Avant-garde pigeons If the Minneapolis Public Library is to be believed, one of the resident pigeons (near the new construction of one of the neighborhood branches) built a nest wholly out of discarded construction wire. For reasons I cannot articulate, I think this is cool. (1 Comment |Comment on this)
8:16 am	I'm apparently middle-aged. Rake Magazine has a fairly decent article on local music in Minneapolis: http://www.rakemag.com/stories/section_detail.aspx?itemID=21355&catID=282&SelectCatID=282 There may be no more telling harbinger of the onslaught of middle age than the stasis that settles over an individual’s music collection, signaling that shift in a passionate fan’s life when he throws in the towel and resigns himself to a soundtrack stalled at a particular point in time. The precise date can usually be determined with a cursory glance through the titles in the CD rack or by estimating the vintage of nearby wedding photos or children’s portraits. Yeah, that sounds about right. I'm also not sure what it says about me that I buy more jazz or trance music lately than anything else. Actually, I do know what it says about me; it says that I write software for a living and the Ramones is not all that conducive to concentration. I think I'm OK with that. (Comment on this)
Thursday, September 7th, 2006
9:03 pm	On a less punchy but still somewhat baffled note.... So, Jim is going to law school at night, in addition to his 40 hour job. This is because he is insane, which is fine. I went to an orientation for spouses/SOs/family members of students so that we know what it's all about, and the pressures, and requirements of LS, and so on like that. There was a discussion panel where people talked about their experiences. Here's the strange part. We were all very strongly encouraged to, in essence, develop our own interests and hobbies and not depend on the other person's presence in order to be complete/enjoy ourselves (I paraphrase). And what I really wanted to say was, "There are people who need to be TOLD this? For REAL?" It was mildly Stepfordish. I mean, what do people think I do during football season? (Well, OK, I ask questions like "Hey, what's offsides again?" and "So, are we the X's or the Zeroes?" but that's just because I am very young for my age.) The bonus, I suppose, is that after he passes the bar I can tell people that I am, say, taking out the garbage or feeding the cat on the advice of my attorney, a la Hunter S. Thompson. The other bonus is that I keep hearing about silly cases. My favorite so far is something about a kid on a tricycle who ran into a woman and she had to get Achilles tendon surgery and she sued, but the loophole there* was she was going to have to prove that the toddler had malicious intent. Makes me proud to be an American, it does.... (*which I have no doubt misquoted, miscited, misrepresented, IANAL, etc) (Comment on this)
8:52 pm	My commute and the rant therein So, I'm driving home through the arterial roads and it's the first day of school, so I get stopped behind a school bus. Apparently now school buses stop at every house, rather than at the corner or every few blocks. So it stopped twice, two houses apart. The weird thing, to me, is that the moms are out meeting the bus, on their front lawn, and that would even be OK except that they're out there with their SLR digital cameras to take a picture of their children getting off this bus. I realize this is probably just me being childfree and punchy about my commute, but I have nephews and nieces, I have friends with children that I like. I am not at all anti-child. I do not, however, see the rationale behind stopping all traffic in both directions on an arterial road so you can have a photo-op of your baby's first steps off the school bus. Twice, if I'm not mistaken; I think I saw the kid being asked to return to the bus so they could try the shoot again. Bizarre. There are really a lot of things about the whole mommy culture that are lost on me. This was also in the very moneyed suburb of Edina, which probably has a lot to do with it. (Comment on this)