Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

The title is slightly misleading; I meant to say that I’m a Wheel of Fortune Idiot Savant or something approaching that classification. If you’ve watched Wheel of Fortune with me, you know that I’m a freak: a freak that’s really good at getting the puzzles before everyone else. :-)

Crissy and I talked about this for a bit and we have a theory on why I have this skill. We immediately ruled out evolution; I’m guessing game-show skills aren’t selected for in the Indian subcontinent.

To explain, let me tell you about my childhood (pull up a chair and relax). We moved a lot when I was a kid. I ended up going to 5 elementary schools in 3 states in 4 different school districts. This meant I never followed a “standard” curriculum.

To make matters worse, I went from good east coast schools to Alabama (cough) and then to good Colorado schools. It’s not that big of a deal; thanks to Mom and Dad teaching me things early and giving me frequent access to all the books I wanted (yay for libraries!), I had an good foundation.

One strange thing that happened though is I never took phonics as a kid. I could read very well, but I never had a formal phonics based education. So technically, my literacy is the memorization based model. My main symptoms of this are having bad spelling as a kid and not recognizing some obscure, esoteric words in print, though I know their meaning and use.

As a result, Crissy and I have lots of conversations like this:

• “Crissy, what’s this word?” [pointing at a word in a book]
• “Oh, that’s [some word]. I’m not sure what exactly it means.”
• “Oh, that. It means [definition].”
• “If you knew what it meant, why did you ask me what it was?”
• “Because I’m stupid, you know that.”
• “Oh yeah. I forgot.”

Anyway, so why do I think I’m good at Wheel of Fortune? Because the foundation of my language skills is memorization with pattern based recognition. Remember all those experiments that show how people can still read text if only the word length, and first and last letters are correct? That’s how my brain works.

The whole point of Wheel is for you guess the answer based on the word length and some correct letters. I’m good at that; I’ve been doing it all my life.

So Phase One: move around a lot as a kid and learn to read the “wrong way”. Phase 2 is to get on the game show. Phase 3? Obviously, Phase 3 is “Profit”. ;-P

I’ve heard that you should try to experience everything at least once. It’s a pretty good idea, but recently I’ve been experiencing way too new bad travel experiences.

Recently, I’ve had the “get stuck on the tarmac at JFK for a few hours” and the “have a multi-stopover European flight get completely re-routed due to weather.”

This week I had “your rental car gets vandalized”. My rental car for my business trip to the Bay Area was a Chrysler 300. It’s a nice looking, fancy car that’s generally not driven by mild mannered Indian guys. When I picked it up, I thought, “Cool, but it will attract the wrong attention. On the plus side, if I feel the need to deal drugs I’ve got the wheels.”

My flight out was Friday morning, so I stayed over at Jamie’s place Thursday night for a great intersection of good outcomes: got to hang out with Jamie and got to sleep a bit more because Jamie lives so close to the airport.

So Friday morning, I walk out to the car to discover that someone had taken a really good swing with a baseball bat into the middle of my car’s windshield. They didn’t smash through (weaklings!), but the damage made it impossible to see out of the windshield and there were glass shards in the driver’s seat.

So I called Hertz and explained what happened. They called me a cab to take me to the airport and had me lock the keys in the glove compartment. I went to airport Hertz and filled out an incident report. Since I had LDW (loss damage waiver), it was all taken care of.

Overall, the experience was pretty straight forward and easy. I was impressed, either this sort of thing happens all the time or they have good training.

This little incident delayed my arrival to the airport. I arrived at security 20 minutes before takeoff, but still managed to make my flight. I didn’t however got to get my customary leaving San Jose Airport Togos sandwich. This meant I didn’t get breakfast or lunch so far in the day. I did get a snack box on the plane so I got to have some cheese product and crackers, sunflower butter (weird and good) with more crackers, apricots, and a cookie.

Let’s hope that all I’ve gotten all this travel drama out of my system; a smooth Christmas travel season would be much appreciated. :-)

To finish the riddle story (or to “close the loop” as they say in the biz), Crissy had no problems with either riddle. I mean, no problem at all.

The second riddle she solved way too quickly by coming up with “teddy bear,” ignoring the rest of the puzzle, and looking under my Winnie-the-Pooh stuffed animal. It wasn’t right underneath Pooh, but once she got on a chair to reach the shelf, she saw the cookie on top of my Ender’s Series books.

That proved to be no fun. :-) That’s what I get for marrying someone smarter than me. Oh well, I’ll get to trick my kids one day. I should be smarter than my kids — at least until they are 5 years old and pass their cookie-hiding old man on the intelligence scale.

Crissy and I are trying to cut down on junk food, so we try not to buy any (if it’s not in the apartment, we can’t eat it). Occasionally, we end up with junk food though. For my birthday, Crissy made a fantastic cookie cake. We tried to give as much of it as possible to our guests, but still ended up with leftovers.

To prevent us from eating too many of them, I hid them. It’s the whole “out of sight, out of mind” thing; but for us, it’s more of an “out of sight, still on your mind, but you can’t find them” thing.

This week, though, I’m in the Bay Area. How’s Crissy supposed to get her fix? We decided that I could create 4 “cookie caches” and give her the location of one per day. But I’m weird, I decided to turn them into riddle form: if you solve the riddle, you can find the cookie.

Unfortunately, I thought of doing the riddles after I hid the cookies, so I have to work really hard to make this work. I hid three, but Crissy accidentally found one, so I had to come up with two riddles. Here’s what I had:

• “If a delectable sweet you seek, under the kingly, crimson headpiece you must peek.”
  • Notice the clever use of rhymes and half-rhymes :-P
  • Answer - the cookie was under my red Monarchs hat (crimson = red, kingly = Monarchs, headpiece = hat)

• “Seek under the descendants of a trapped bear hunted by #26, yet above the musings of a man of whom a deck would consist of 52, and you will find your heart’s desire.”
  • This one was painful to make since I hid it in a hard to describe place; plus I wasn’t feeling that creative when I made it up.
  • #26 is Teddy Roosevelt. The trapped bear refers to the origin of the “Teddy Bear”. Descendants of Teddy Bears? Well, that’s a horribly bad way to allude to stuffed animals (teddy bears are the precursors to stuffed animals). So the first part of the clue is, “Look under the stuffed animals.”
  • “of whom a deck would consist of 52″ - the key word here is “card” (there are 52 cards in a deck). The “musings” refer to “writings”, so you need to look above the books written by Card -> Orson Scott Card.
  • Basically, the cookie is on top of my Orson Scott Card books, which happen to be on the shelf under all the stuffed animals.

Crissy got the first riddle really fast despite hearing “tingly, crimson headpiece” over the phone (instead of “kingly, crimson headpiece”).

The second one, I barely understand it. And I wrote it. We’ll find out how she does.

Yeah, I’m a nerd, I know. :-)

Last weekend, Crissy and I ventured to the mall so that I could buy some new clothes. I picked up some new shirts and a new pair of Dockers Cargo Pants. I haven’t had cargo pants in a while and I’ve forgotten how much I like them. I mean, I can carry all my stuff (keys, wallet, cell phone, other cell phone when at work, iPod when on the plane, guns when I need to pack heat, etc.) on me without having to use my back pockets. So I can sit comfortably; it’s awesome.

The pants that I tried on are a fashionable green that would look good with gray or black shirts (so Crissy tells me). The ones I tried on didn’t fit, so on the way to the cash register I switched them for the correct size.

The next morning, I open the bag and found brown pants. Weird, I guess when I got the correct size I picked the wrong color. Oh well, no big deal. So I put them on and when I walked outside I found that I was wearing green pants. Magic! Voldemort lives and is attacking my pants!

It turns out that depending on the lighting, my pants are a different color. Great, now when I get dressed I have to keep in mind the lighting I will encounter the rest of the day. :-)

Social security taxes are one of those great stealth taxes. Most people know that you pay 6.2% of your wages into the Social Security Trust, but most don’t know that your employer also pays 6.2%.  So you really pay 12.4% (which is indeed what self-employed people have to pay).

Social security taxes only apply up till a certain amount of your income. For 2007, it applied towards your first $97,500 of income. Next year it goes up to $102,000. You can see all the details here. So if you’re fortunate enough to make that much money, you’ll pay $558 more (or 4.62% more) for a total of $12,468.

I guess this adjustment comes every year, seems weird that you can just change payroll taxes without a vote. Maybe it was in some large budget bill or something.

I have an either incredibly stupid or incredibly brilliant late night thought to share. It came to me at 3 am last night; and when it gets that late it’s either really smart or really stupid, there’s no middle ground.

So here it is, awful is bad and awesome is good. Or to take the words apart, being “full of aw” (awful) is bad, and having “some of aw” (awesome) is good. So what if you have no “aw”? You must rock.

Based on this thorough analysis, I’m declaring a new word to represent having no aw: “awenone”. Obviously this means “leaps and bounds better than awesome”. So kids, when you grow up, you don’t want to be awesome, you want to be awenone!

It’s the “eleventh day of the eleventh month”, when we mark Armistice Day, the day hostilities on the Western Front of WWI ceased. Today is celebrated all over the world. If you see people wearing poppies around this time of year, it’s in reference to the poem “In Flanders Fields“.

We celebrated Armistice Day here in the US, until we changed it to be “Veterans Day” during the height of the Cold War. The reasons in the resolution was to honor the veterans of all wars, not just WWI.

But there’s a strange subtle shift here, when it was Armistice Day, we were celebrating peace, with the hope that war is just an aberration to the norm. Then we shifted from celebrating peace to celebrating the soldiers. It’s definitely good to celebrate the sacrifices of soldiers, but it seems like peace should have its day too.

Remember, there’s a lot in a name. We used to have a “Department of War”, then it was briefly called the “National Military Establishment”, before it became the “Department of Defense”. Noodle on that for a while. ;-)

Often I have various thoughts, including lots of funny observations that pop into my head (like how the addition of too much eco-friendly technology (sensors, etc.) in the bathroom at work have made it much worse for the environment). I try to remember to jot these down, but usually forget and they are gone forever.

Tonight (most of the interesting thoughts come at night), I was thinking about culture and the arts. A lot of people say that the arts are an indication of the health of a culture. I’ve felt that if a culture is producing new, meaningful art, there’s something at the culture’s core that’s healthy and vibrant. When there’s a lot of creativity and innovation in a culture, it’s not just the arts that prosper, but you get new breakthroughs in sciences and philosophies that are extremely beneficial for the people.

I’m guessing that most anthropologists would agree, because a society must product enough basic resources (food, energy, etc.) to free up part of the population for the professions that bring long term value — someone’s got to grow the food that feeds the research scientist and the artist. Economically, if the research scientist and artist are providing enough value, then it’s worth feeding them. So a society that has good growth in these areas has some fundamental soundness.

Cultures that are “stuck in their ways”, are less likely to embrace anything that challenges the status quo. They get stuck, there’s less innovation, and less growth. A symptom of this is a dearth of new concepts in art. Instead the same old songs and stories are recycled and retold. The paintings and sculptures are slightly different but really just more of the same.

Now, it’s tough to measure pace of growth in sciences and philosophies, because a lot of the effects are long term. You can, however, measure art relatively easily. I’ve often heard that the barbaric spectacles at the Roman Colosseum were at indication of the cultural decay of Rome. Not only was it a horrible disregard for human life, but it shows that the arts weren’t producing anything more entertaining. Or the Romans no longer appreciated anything better.

So, is Reality TV our Colosseum? Honestly, most of it is a utter nonsense. I openly admit I like some of the shows, but man, when you think about it, they are completely pointless. I still can’t comprehend how anyone can like Deal or No Deal. It’s so utterly contrived and there’s no skill involved at all.

Is Reality TV a symptom of American’s culture fading? Either we as a society can’t produce anything better than The Bachelor or we lost the ability to appreciate anything better. Either way, it’s pretty sad.

The last day of my Krakow trip was the trip back. We all had early flights, so we met in the hotel lobby at 4:30 am, checked out and piled in a van to the airport. The roads in Krakow, especially to the airport, are pretty poorly maintained. This was made worse, by the incredibly dense fog that reduced visibility to about 100 feet. It was a beautiful drive through the fog to the airport, but a little nerve-racking not seeing where you are going.

The airport was a little interesting since my passport recently stopped swiping properly, causing delays and funny looks from passport control. And the security guards at the airport didn’t speak English so we had to pantomime things like, “Where are your liquids and gels?” and “Is solid deodorant a gel?” I’m sure it was pretty funny to watch.

Once the snack bar opened up (at 6 am sharp) we all got breakfast; I had hot chocolate (of course), orange juice, a horrible tasting spinach, cheese, and sun-dried tomato sandwich, and some pretzels. I bought the pretzels mostly because they said, “Incredible Smak!”; who am I to turn down a “Smak”?

Then our “plane” boarded. Rather, we all got on a bus that would take us to the plane. The Krakow airport is really small, so the bus drove us about 25 feet from the door to the airplane. Fairly inefficient, but it’s probably better than having a bunch of passengers loaded up on “Smak” wandering around the tarmac.

Once we were on the plane, we found out that the Munich airport had dense fog and we couldn’t leave for at least 30 minutes. I originally was to fly to Munich on Lufthansa, then to Amsterdam on KLM, and then on Northwest to Seattle. I was already nervous about the connection in Munich since I just had one hour (which would be just enough time), but any delay would make things interesting.

The previous night I did some research on alternate flights once I got to Munich. I could take SAS via Copenhagen or BA via London, though both routes would have me arrive hours later than planned.

So, I called my travel agent and had him book me from Munich to Copenhagen and then to Seattle. Since I had paper tickets, I would need to have the issuing airline agree to move me to SAS. Once we landed in Munich (about an hour and a half late), I hurried to a Lufthansa desk to find a 30 minute line due to all the delays and people missing connections.

I finally got through and found out that we needed Northwest to validate the tickets (even though they weren’t the issuer). We tried to get them on the phone for about 20 minutes, then find someone with the authority, and then finally make them agree to validate it. The Lufthansa agent then needed to do the paperwork to transfer the vouchers from Northwest to them so that they could re-issue the tickets. That took another 20 minutes. The airline ticketing system is really old and complicated and could use a major overhaul.

Finally, we decided that since the layover in Copenhagen was only an hour, it was risky to go there, so I got routed through London. I was put on the next flight to London (which was boarding at the time), so I rushed over there to find out that it was delayed another 15 minutes. That gave me just enough time to get a Munich magnet for my mom. :-)

The Munich airport is really nice; it’s like a modern shopping mall that happens to have gates for airplanes. It’s too bad that I didn’t have the chance to explore it a bit more.

Once I got in London, there was a small chance of catching an earlier flight to Seattle. But London-Heathrow is a huge airport and it took about 45 minutes to get to my gate (including passport control, security rescreening, and ticket counters). I had about 3 hours to kill before my flight so I found another magnet for my mom and had dinner (pizza and Fanta).

Finally, the plane boarded and I was on my way back. The British Airways plane was pretty nice, I flew in Coach Premium (or something like that) so the seat was a little bigger than usual. The next class up had these weird pods that faced each other in clusters of 4, they were supposed to be better than normal seating, but it look really strange to me. I was so exhausted, I slept almost all of this flight.

Immigration in Seattle was annoying. The TSA guy asked me where I was (”Poland”) and did I buy anything (”Lots of little souvenirs that say ‘Krakow’”). He looked at me annoyed and confused, and then said, “Why Krakow?” I replied, “That’s where I was; Krakow is a city is Poland.” He looked at me suspiciously and finally let me through.

I learned two important things from this trip home:

1. Paper tickets are good. They are like currency, so you have a lot more flexibility in changing flights as needed. If I had e-tickets, I don’t think that I could transfer my tickets from Northwest to Lufthansa, so I would have stay on NWA and likely fly to AMS on the next flight and then fly to Detroit or Minneapolis and then eventually to Seattle. That would have cost me at least 12 more hours of travel time.
2. When connecting on flights, make sure your outbound carrier is leaving from their hub. For example, flying out of Munich on Lufthansa gives more flexibility than flying with KLM, since Lufthansa has more flights, agents, and more options at a hub than at a spoke.