No shirt, No shoes, No service!
Has anyone else ever noticed that these signs fail to require pants?
Glaring Omission
4
Academia
I was thinking about this last night…
In my earlier years in school (e.g., first grade), I thought of learning as facts. George Washington was the first POTUS. (And, a more handy acronym, the SCOTUS is the nation’s highest court.)
Of course, it’s not even true to say that all I was learning was facts, but it’s how I thought learning should be measured. Around that time I was also finishing up mastering the skill of reading, and learning arithmetic.
Nowadays, though, I learn very few facts. (In Forensics we learned that a person who has been poisoned usually has purple fringing (but not chromatic abberations…) on their extremities, especially fingertips.) But mostly, I’m learning concepts and strategies. Last night we talked about the Blue Ocean Strategy, for example. The “facts” might be what a “blue ocean” is, versus a “red ocean.” But I’m not here to learn colors. The real learning was the concepts and the strategy.
The problem is that I haven’t quite gotten over that mindset that learning is measured in facts, and I’m not learning a lot of them. It also makes the “So, what have you learned?” question harder. “Well, a person who’s been poisoned may have a purple tint in their extremities,” but that’s not really going to impress people with my business knowledge. (I’ll be sure to bring it up an interview. I hear some businesses these days are looking for cutthroat people.)
Words I Still Can’t Spell
Here’s a list of words I screw up almost every time I try to spell them:
- Ubiquitous
- Silhouette
- Schizophrenia
- Curiosity
(Ironically, I got every one right on my first try here.) Curiosity is the surprising one, because it’s a simple word. But why the heck isn’t it curiousity? I guess the key is that you drop the “u” sound when going from “curious” to “curiosity,” but it still messes with me. Ubiquitous just has way too many vowels. Silhouette is French, and I always screw up French words. There’s no reason for there to be an h in it, nor a u, really. And the problem with schizophrenia is that it’s prounounced “skit-za-phrenia,” so you expect a t in there, and you don’t expect it to start sch. But it does.
The JQ
Introducing a new measurement: an e-mail junk quotient (JQ), defined as e-mails deleted on sight divided by non-spam e-mails received over a given period of time. N.B. that JQ doesn’t factor in spam. It’s actual e-mails sent to you.
The past two days, my JQ has been at about 95%. It’s typically below 50%. It’s actually pretty remarkable how bad it is: I’ll check my e-mail, have four new messages, and just seeing the subject and the sender, I delete them. I don’t care about a marketing internship, because I’m not a marketing major. I don’t care about a study-abroad trip in London, especially when it’s the third e-mail I’ve had about it.
Am I alone here? So much of the e-mail I receive is just utter junk!
Tilt-Shift
PBase has a cool feature where you can search by lens. I searched for a few I was interested in, and came across some amazing photos taken with Canon’s 24mm Tilt-shift lens. Tilt-shifts are weird, and descriptions of them are either very basic (first sentence on the Wikipedia article), or very complex (involving the Scheimpflug principle).
I came across one particularly neat gallery. Tilt-shifts are known for two things. One is that you can use them to correct the ‘distortion’ where lines seem to converge. Check out this photo as an example, and another. Notice how nice and vertical the lines are? Compare it to this one, which is still a neat photo, but notice how all the building seem to ‘slant.’ (And an extreme example: it becomes more pronounced at wider angles.)
The other thing it’s good for, though, is playing ‘tricks’ with depth of field. An example. And here’s one with it tilted to the right. So I think I want to try a 24mm TS lens some time.
As an aside, since all my photos were to this one neat gallery, I’ll point out some that have nothing to do with tilt-shift, but are just cool. This one is one of the more brilliant uses of unusual angles. (It’s the same concept as some other photos I saw once, which was done on ice/snow for an even cooler effect.) It’s really pretty remarkable. This one is cool, too. (And another.) Here’s a great one of Boston Harbor. And here’s one showing how cool a 12mm lens is. I think it saw some post-processing, but this one is really cool, too. Ibid.
But my favorite, by far, is this set of Logan. Last time I flew into Logan, all I could think was, “Wow, this would be a great spot for photos.”
Renting a Lens
I think I mentioned my newfound interest in camera lens rentals. In particular, the prices are lower than I’d have expected. I have a few different things in mind…
The weekend before Thanksgiving, I’m going to an event with all the major presidential candidates. I’ve found that 200mm isn’t long enough to get good close-ups, and that f/5.6 is far too slow for indoor shooting. (Especially as I don’t like shooting above ISO800.) So I need something longer and faster.
- The ubiquitous choice is Canon’s 70-200mm f/2.8 lens. f/2.8 is extraordinarily fast, and, as an added bonus, it has Image Stabilization, which apparently eliminates motion blur from hand-holding. 200mm isn’t long enough, but with a 1.4x or 2x teleconverter, it’s long and yet still fast.
- If I didn’t need the image stabilization, Sigma has a 120-300mm f/2.8 lens, which is just as fast but has f/2.8 at 300mm.
- Sigma makes another interesting one, an 80-400mm lens. It’s slower at f/4.5-5.6, but it has their OS (Optical Stabilization), basically the same as Canon’s IS. And 400mm is nice and long!
- I’m a fan of zooms, because I like getting things framed exactly, but Canon makes a 200mm f/2.8 prime, which is highly-regarded and small.
There are some other lenses that I’m interested in, maybe for Thanksgiving or just for general shooting, that I’d like to try:
- Canon’s 85mm f/1.2 lens is ridiculously fast. It gets the shots that nothing else can. (Well, except for its little brother, the 50mm f/1.2)
- I’m interested in the wide end of things. Sigma has a 12-24mm lens, which is ridiculously wide-angle. There’s some (pretty much unavoidable) distortion at the wide end, although it can be cleaned up in software. It’s seemingly a popular choice with people taking interior shots.
- Sigma makes all the interesting ones… They’ve got a 20mm f/1.8, which is both really wide and really fast. And it’s quite cheap.
- Sigma also makes a 30mm f/1.4 lens, sometimes compared to the 50mm f/1.4 series for full-frame sensors. It’s also much cheaper than Canon’s 35mm f/1.4 lens.
There’s also something unavoidable about going for moon shots, something that requires a nice long lens. (And either a steady hand or a tripod.) It looks like the Thanksgiving time-frame will coincide with a full-ish moon.
Mixing it Up
This is from my, “Really abstract thoughts” file…
Often you try to recruit leaders internally, because they’re familiar with your existing procedures. On some level this is good. But “familiar with your existing procedures” also means that they see things with blinders on. Sometimes I think you have to bring in someone without any of that institutional knowledge, to shake things up and move you in a new direction.
For example, there’ve been a rash of thefts from the library. People will sit there working with their laptop, get up to go the bathroom, and their laptop is stolen. (Part of this, of course, is their own negligence.) I couldn’t possibly know the full story, but it looks to me like CP is content with just writing reports for each theft and letting insurance handle it.
Why not set up a “sting” in the library? Put a few plainclothes cops (we have several!) in the library, “studying.” Get someone to leave their laptop unattended. Wait for the thief, who clearly is comfortable stealing things in public. And then, arrest him.
Similarly, there were two crimes this week where they caught the suspect on video camera. (Neither was exactly a major crime, though.) In both cases, though, they say they can’t identify who it is, and that’s the end of it. Why not show it to a student, who may well recognize it? Or why not publish it? The school newspaper is always desperate for material. We’d love to run a few stills from the tapes.
Too many people seem to assume that you need to master all the ‘cruft’ that existing leaders have. I don’t know nearly as much as the police chief, so far be it from me to have ideas. And yet I’m fairly certain my ideas would work. The “sting” might be a little over the top, but it beats the status quo of doing nothing!
Oh, another example! My digital SLR camera is basically a film SLR with a digital sensor instead of film. I never quite understood why you needed things like a complex mirror array or a shutter. Couldn’t you just take them out, and just sample the sensor for whatever time period you needed for the exposure?
It turns out, yes. There are a few little “gotchas” I wasn’t aware of, but mostly, they’re holdovers from the film world. People designing the cameras just still have that leftover baggage of the film era, so they keep making cameras with shutters and mirrors. A tiny little bit of R&D could probably eliminate the problems with simply removing them, and you’d end up with something with increased reliability, the ability to take faster exposures, and added versatility. But it looks like it’s going to take an “outsider” to get this done.
Yes, you need some existing knowledge to keep you in reality. But people seem to averse to letting ‘new’ people have ideas. And in my experience, they’re the best ideas. Getting the record industry to distribute music over the Internet took Shawn Fanning and, finally, a failing computer company in California. Why didn’t the record industry, with a multi-billion-dollar budget, think of it? (And, even now that lots of evidence shows that it’s doing well, many record companies are still digging in their heels!) Organizations get too big, crufty, and narrow-minded, which causes them to think that only the biggest, cruftiest, and most narrow-minded of them should be allowed to try out ideas. Why?! Do people like the “stability” of their old ways — selling CDs and booing the Internet, using unnecessary moving parts in cameras, and not catching criminals — even when the old ways are clearly the worst possibly way to do things? Are they so bent on sticking with what they know that they’re willing to lose?
Windows, Reviewed
Mr. T’s post jibed with something that was in the back of my head. I can’t sleep right now, and have sent my friends enough meandering e-mails, so I’ll post here.
For at least the past month, I’ve been in Linux exclusively. I have a 160 GB, 5400 RPM drive with Linux, and a 60 GB, 7200 RPM drive with Windows. (I also have a combination of network storage and external drives for moving/storing data.)
My roommates have been big into Orange Box lately, so I figured I’d give it a try. (It can apparently be made to run under Wine, actually, but I didn’t want to bother.) I swapped out disks, booting into Windows. And it was just one thing wrong after another after that. Admittedly, many of the problems weren’t directly the fault of Windows, but it was truly the worst experience I’ve had in a long time. (Steam was even more badly-behaved than Windows.)
Here are some things that really bug me:
- Performance. Windows has my ‘fast’ hard drive. I scan regularly for viruses and spyware. (But I’m so OCD that I’ve literally never had any viruses, or even any malware, on this machine.) I disable unnecessary crap from starting up. I run a lean, mean machine. And with a dual-core processor and 2 gigs of RAM, it should fly. Especially on the 7200 RPM drive. And yet I can be in Firefox browsing the web under Linux in less than it takes Windows to finish logging me in. I don’t really understand what’s going on, really.
- Fragmentation. Maybe this partially explains the above point. Most operating systems don’t make a big deal about disk fragmentation. It’s (supposedly) just a non-issue on both Linux and MacOS filesystems. I suppose I wouldn’t know, not having a defrag tool. But my Windows drive is laughably fragmented. I have more fragmented files than non-fragmented. And, when I was using Windows regularly, I’d run a pull-out-all-the-stops defrag every week or so, scheduling a boot-time defrag to make sure it also got my paging file and the MFT. Having successfully “fixed” my heavily-fragmented paging file, I thought it a done deal. But it’s again in about 300 pieces. What the hell? I thought it was one file. Where did it go? I know it stays between sessions because I tried to get rid of it when shutting down and couldn’t. So what happened?! And really, shouldn’t that be permanently mapped out?
- Bizarre errors. I never thought I’d see the day when I was criticizing Windows and not Linux for this. Linux still has its share of bad errors. But what’s with the “The memory cannot be ‘read'” errors? (BTW, Memtest finds nothing.) What’s with rtvscan.exe crashing?
- Slow performance. Not just bootup, mentioned earlier. When I go to start an application, I usually sit there waiting for several seconds. Just sitting, waiting. I’ve never had this problem under Linux. Maybe it’s just that Linux isn’t a fan of big ‘suites’ of programs, preferring to have lots of little lean applications. But I click on the Firefox icon in Linux and Firefox pops up. I click on the IE icon in Windows and my disk churns and, five seconds later, it pops up. Why?!
- Disk mounting. Again, I never thought I’d see the day when I thought Linux had this better than Windows. It used to be that you’ve have to pull up the command line and su to root and mount a device manually, specifying the device name and a mount path and the file format and various other parameters. Unplugging the device without unmounting it would usually lock up the system and/or cause a kernel panic. Now in Ubuntu I just plug in external devices and they show up on my desktop. They’re comparable that way. (Although Linux doesn’t give me five little bubble icons in a row about “Unknown device” and searching for drivers.) But what about when I want to remove something? In Linux, I right-click and select “Unmount,” and the icon disappears and I remove it. I forget periodically and nothing bad happens. I consider myself to be a very advanced ‘power user’ of Windows, and I’m still not sure. Do I click on that little icon in the system tray? Why is it so hard to use? I’ll find something that sounds like what I want, and I click on it, and it brings up this hierarchy of devices, ranging from the name of the physical disk to a ‘mass storage device,’ and asks which I want to stop. And honestly, I know a lot about Windows and I know all about the hardware, and I’m still never sure. Rusty informs me that Vista’s the same way.
- Updating. I guess it’s not as practical since Windows has a whole different environment, but MacOS and Linux both have a centralized package manager. An automated daily check might inform me that my word processor and graphics editor have new versions, and let me choose what to do. In Windows, each application does this on its own. It’d be kind of nice if Windows had a central package manager, just so that I wouldn’t have constant headaches when running Windows for the first time in a month with everything I start going out and downloading new updates.
- File copying sucks! I’ve long-complained about how copying a group of files shouldn’t abort completely when it hits one bad file. But I discovered something else. I was getting low on disk space, so I was moving things over to another drive. I had about 3 GB free, and was going to move a DVD ISO over to the external drive, too, for 7-8 GB free. But it wouldn’t work, due to insufficient disk space. I was confused, because there was plenty of space on the target disk (like 400 GB free). It’s apparently that the Windows drive didn’t have enough space. Which for a second almost made sense: it’s a big file, so it needs room to work. But wait… Why? It can move it, chunk-by-chunk, over to the new disk. I can’t think of any other way of doing it, in fact. And there’s enough room to copy it at least 75 times.
Half-jokingly, I pondered over e-mail, “Why do people ask if Linux is ready for the desktop? The question, I think, is ‘Is Windows ready for the desktop?’ And I’m not sure.” But really, if I have constant headaches, I can only imagine how the people with 75 IE toolbars and lots of spyware and viruses and no idea how computers work must feel. I think my computer is slow? I have bizarre, unexplained errors? I’m confused by technobabble messages that pop up?
Of course, in the interest of fairness, there are two things that I’m liking about Windows:
- I can put my laptop into standby / suspend. It’s been possible under Linux for years, but doesn’t work properly out of the box for me, and I don’t feel like jumping through hoops to make it work.
- There’s this one insidious bug (I’m running the “bleeding edge,” Ubuntu’s Gutsy Gibbon, so I suppose I can’t complain too loudly) where the logout/shutdown button locks up the machine for 30 seconds before it displays. This is apparently a known problem with several different causes, but it seems pretty pathetic that it’s still an issue.
Oh, see, this is exactly what I hate! As I’m writing this, I can hear my hard drive going. And the disk activity light is on solid. What’s going on? I have no clue! All I have open is Firefox. Some background process is apparently accessing my disk. What is it? I’m not quite sure!
Conversations, Poor
A conversation I had yesterday.
What I thought was said:
Me: picks up a bag of Cheez-Its he brought to meeting Them: “Where did you get those?” Me: “I got it over in Adamian, at the vending machines.” Them: [incredulous look] Me: “I was going to go to Einstein’s for a bagel, but the line was too long.”
What was actually said:
Them: “Oh, nice haircut!” Me: “I got it at the vending machines in Adamian!” Them: [incredulous look] Me: [discusses attempt at dinner]
Jobs I’ve Overlooked
Kyle has a book called Gigs that I’ve been reading. Basically they interview hundreds of people with various jobs about what they do. “We feel that the world hears too much from ‘experts’ of all political stripes, and not enough from the people for and about whom they presume to speak,” one of the editors writes. Reading just a bit of the book so far, I’ve realized a few things:
- People are people. So many people view people at work as just a human embodiment of a company, or merely as an ‘object’ with which they’re forced to interact. (Sidenote: spending some time in customer service should be mandatory for everyone.) A bus driver talks about the abuse she takes when the bus is late. A flight attendant complains about the time someone threw a hamburger in her face because he didn’t want it. The world would be a much better place if people could see that people were people.
- I’ve narrowed my horizons far too much. I never considered that I could be:
- A train engineer. He apparently makes about $90,000 a year and gets to see the country. The hours aren’t great, though, and I’d probably get bored.
- A member of the paparazzi. I love photography anyway. This guy has a wild job. He doesn’t mention his salary (he works for a magazine), only that one of his photos got him into the “six-figure club,” referring to his revenues from a single photograph. He does claim to have been punched by Alec Baldwin, and mentions that he goes to the bathroom in his car because he has to remain vigilant. Those aren’t the working conditions I look forward to.
- A porn star, although he makes the job sound less appealing than I’d have imagined.
- Fisherman. It’s intense work, and risky, but he makes good money.
- Casino surveillance officer. Watching hundreds of cameras. It actually sounds fun, though I’m not sure I’d be making the $40,000+ that jobs out of college are supposed to pay.
- Drug dealer. He made good money!
There are so many more I haven’t read. Slaughterhouse human resources director? Chief Executive Officer? (I’ll do it!) Clutter consultant? Crime scene cleaner? Taxidermist? Bar owner? Buffalo rancher? Food stylist? Anchorwoman? (Err, man, in my case.) Television station receptionist? Carnival worker? Squash instructor? Transvestite prostitute? Mother? The possibilities are endless for me! College professor! Bounty hunter! Prisoner! Town manager! Psychiatric rehabilitation therapist!