Defenestrating Thoughts from the Bivouac

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!

I’ve had a recent spike in visitors to my blog. Ordinarily, that could mean that people are enjoying my writing. I knew that this was not the case for two reasons: (1) people don’t like my writing :-) and (2) I hadn’t written anything in a while.

But it turns out the recent surge of traffic isn’t from people coming to my blog, but a large amount of bots controlled by spammers. And no, I didn’t need some clever traffic analysis tool to help me figure this out. This one was easy; the 250 spam comments in my moderation queue were a clear giveaway. :-)

In what now can be considered an ongoing joke, my co-workers decided that my recent time off (for Crissy’s and my one year anniversary vacation ) was spent hooking up with Britney Spears. Apparently there was some big celebrity breaking news while I was gone about Britney, so again, I returned to work to find the latest copy of US Weekly with that story on the cover.

They had planned to paste a picture of me over the guy with Britney on the cover. This would have been hilarious, but they never got around to it. While I give them bonus points for the idea, you sometimes just have to execute on a good idea. :-)

My watch stopped. Or more accurately, the battery needs replacement. On June 30th, the battery wasn’t strong enough to update the date display and then 2 weeks ago, the time hands stopped. I kept wearing the watch out of habit for a day or two (which is weird) and finally stopped wearing it.

Yes, I know. I should just get a new battery, but I haven’t gotten around to it. In the meantime, I learned that I really don’t need the watch as much as I thought. Unfortunately, it’s not because of some new enlightened state, where I transcended the bonds of our temporal existence or some mumbo-jumbo.

No, it’s because there’s a clock everywhere. There’s one on my computer at my desk, one in my car, one in every room at work and most of the rooms in my apartment. Plus there’s one on my cell phone. And one on my Blackberry. And probably in places I haven’t even noticed.

It makes me wonder, what other ridiculous redundancies do we have in our every day lives?

One thing I really like about the status feature in Facebook is that it forces you to write in third person. In college, I had way too much fun writing AOL away messages in the style of bad Roman mythology with myself as the mythical hero. No really, I referred to myself as “our hero”. :-)

For example, from Dec 11, 1999:

Our hero, upon returning from the Nickerson hermitage, is shocked that the wise had absolutely nothing of value to say to him, though his kids were cute and funny. Our hero, after devouring his cold veggie sandwich, attempted to land himself a mole in the Beezer empire. However his contact was less than brilliant and let our hero muttering nonsense about the b-school and the lack of a good educational system in democratic nations. So our hero decides to quit procrastinating and attempt to use his special powers to find the secret bio decoder ring. Will our hero find the ring to slay the Elgin and Pakrasi tag team in Monday Morning Madness? Are will he choose to seek refuge in his EE Design Project? Stay tuned…

Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your perspective), I only saved a handful of these writings. The rest are nothing more than lost bits and bytes in the vast universe of electrons.

And in case you’re wondering:

• Jackson Nickerson was the professor of Management 100 class that I was the TA for. I think I was referring to a dinner we had with him and his family.
• Cold veggie sandwiches were one of my staples in college (there wasn’t that much vegetarian dorm food).
• Beezer is my friend Bryce, who for literary purposes was one of my many antagonists.
• The reference to educational systems in democratic nations was likely some research I was doing for my column in the student paper. I wrote about geopolitics. I’m sure some of the old columns are floating around the web, which is unfortunate since I was a really bad writer back then. (Yes, even worse than now.)
• The decoder ring is a reference to an ongoing joke since high school, about how you need a decoder ring (like the ones in cereal boxes) to understand difficult topics.
• I don’t remember much about Monday Morning Madness, except that it was significant.
• Elgin and Pakrasi were the team of professors that taught our biology course (Bio 297, I think)
• EE Design Project is a reference to the really complicated EE projects we had. They were great for procrastinating on other school work.

Anyway, this got me thinking about cool plug-ins and apps for Facebook that I should build, but I’m sleepy so I’ll have to discuss them some other time.

When we learned about Crissy’s dad, I sent a quick email to my teams at work saying that I would be out for a family emergency. As I was a bit distracted when writing it, I was accidentally very cryptic to the nature of the emergency. My search freshness team (who are always on top of the latest Internet buzz) decided that my absence had something to do with the latest celebrity gossip.

So upon my return to work, I found a recent copy of Us Weekly declaring that Nicole Ritchie is pregnant and a congratulatory bottle of champagne. :-)

Crissy’s and my apartment is a mess. Not a mess like with dirt and garbage everywhere, but a mess where all our stuff is ridiculously disorganized. It’s probably because our rooms are over-purposed. Our second bedroom is my office, the guest room, Crissy’s painting studio, Crissy’s office and storage. The dining room is a dining room, library (has half my collection), Crissy’s jewelry business studio, and additional kitchen storage.

And it certainly doesn’t help that we added a bunch more stuff from my little sister (when she moved out of her college apartment) and all of our camping stuff is still out from our Memorial Day trip.

So we decided to reorganize everything and move a lot of the furniture around. Now the dining room will become Crissy’s painting and jewelry studios, Crissy’s office, and part of the library. The second bedroom is the guest room, my office, the storage, and the area we need for the non-creative parts of Crissy’s business (packing, shipping, paperwork).

If you read closely you’ll notice that we no longer have a “dining room”, which sort of stinks. But, it turned out that this was the one function of the room we used the least. We’ve been talking about renting a bigger apartment or a house soon, so it should all work out.

Once all the cleaning is under control I plan to do another round of eBay-ing stuff we don’t need. I call it eBay Cost Recovery, since you are usually just getting a fraction of the original cost back. Last time, I did this I made back $600. I think this time I could pass $750. Hopefully this will free up a bunch of space.

Once this is done, it’ll be time to get Crissy’s jewelry business launched on the web. Up, up and away!

That’s right, after talking about it for years, I finally replaced my legendary 1992 Honda Accord on Friday. And I replaced it with… a 2007 Honda Accord! Woohoo! :-)

I’m pretty happy to have a new car with that great new car smell. I decided to spoil myself a little and get lots of unnecessary options (the EX-L trim level) so I have things like heated leather seats, dual climate control, and a moon-roof.

Since I used this great service called Fighting Chance to learn exactly how car dealerships work and how to shop for a car, I managed to get a incredible deal. In fact, no other dealer in the area could beat (and only one could match) the price that Lynnwood Honda gave me.

I choose the Accord after looking at lots of cars. I eliminated Hybrids, because I feel the technology needs one or two more years before it could be as reliable long term as my old Accord had been.The second reason is I think in 10 years, we probably won’t even have Hybrids cars, since we’ll find some sort of transmission-less car that would be better for the environment.

I wanted to stick with Toyotas or Hondas because of quality and reputation. And I didn’t want a smaller compact (like a Civic or Corolla) because in a few years there will be a “baby on board” so I preferred a larger sedan.

I didn’t want the Camry since it has a funny looking back and it is a few thousand more for some reason. I thought a lot about getting a compact SUV (RAV4 or CRV). I did like those cars a lot. But I ultimately decided that we’ll get one of those “Mommy cars” when we replace Crissy’s car in a few years.

I sold my old car private party right before picking up my new one, so I essentially did a car swap. I was a little sad driving back to work in my new car, but the nice guys who do the valet service at work cheered me up with their ooo-ing and ahh-ing. And when I came to pick up my car, I found it parked with traffic cones around it, so no one could park too close and dent it. :-)

So I’m happy with my new car. I know it’s reliable, has more than enough power for me (166 hp), safe (six airbags, anti-lock brakes, etc.), it looks good, and the price was right.

We had a party this weekend for St. Patrick’s Day which was a lot of fun with people staying over hanging out until past 4 am. I love weekends, but they make it really hard to wake up on weekdays. :-)

Crissy and I have gotten much more efficient at cooking and cleaning for our parties and the preparation for this party was going pretty well, until there was a BANG and very hot, blue glass went flying everywhere. I was making a lasagna and I accidently turned on the wrong burner so our nice blue Pyrex bake dish, which is not stovetop friendly, became an unintentional IED.

Fortunately we were both a few feet away and the glass didn’t reach a high velocity. Unfortunately, there was a high probability that glass shards flew into the yet to be assembled lasagne noodles and stuffing. Crissy took charge (with crisis management skills forged in the classroom) and sent me to the grocery store for new ingredients (we didn’t want to feed a spinach and glass lasagna to our friends), while she cleaned the mess.

Like my adventures in beard trimming, I was surprised how many people had very similar experiences. Almost everyone at the party had this happen before, including the slightly melted kitchen floor from the hot glass. In fact some people had it happen so recently that they told us that we could replace the broken dish at Fred Meyer since they are currently on sale. :-)

Today’s post is nothing more then a slightly organized stream of thoughts that have been swirling around my head this morning. I’d like to think that they are related in a subtle and amazingly insightful way, but I haven’t quite found it yet. :-)

A lot of books talk about how many people should be in an organized group of people. In management books, they talk about how the maximum size for a project team is 150. The reasoning is that in small groups order is maintained by personal interactions and loyalties — in groups this size everyone knows everyone. Once you have a large amount of people, it’s easier to “hide and slack”. In larger companies and organizations this can be very apparent.

Related to this, though I’m not sure where I heard it (probably The Tipping Point), is the idea that in a social group or setting, people will end up in groups of 5 to 7 at most. This seems related to the ideas in The Mythical Man-Month, which basically says that the number of interconnections in a group increase exponentially compared to the number of people.

And you’ve probably seen this in action. At parties, people always break into groups of around 5 people to chat and socialize.

The thing I find most interesting is that these ideas were first proposed after observing primates in the wild. I guess we do have a lot in common with our hairy brethren. :-)

Somehow related is the Fundamental Attribution Error theory which was developed 40 years ago, and was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in the Tipping Point. The basic idea is that people tend explain a person’s action by attributing it to their personality disproportionally compared to the situation.

The last thing that was swirling in my mind was how susceptible we are to what we see and hear. That’s why commercials are so effective; why wouldn’t you get hungry when watching TV, every other commericial is for some sort of food!

So there are some obvious and interesting connections between the ideas, but I’m still not seeing anything super insightful. Oh well, I tried. :-)