serinde

The place that I would most want to go dancing is the kind of place that would play Oingo Boingo.

Srsly. Bite me in 3-D.

Situation: There is a thrice-yearly meeting, which consists of $OVERBOSS, as CIO, telling a varied audience consisting of interested parties in the administration, the faculty, and a couple of student representatives what we're spending the student technology fee on. This makes sense.

My attendance is, in theory, relevant for two reasons: 1) because the student workers I will be managing are almost entirely paid out of said monies, and 2) because the hat that's glommed onto me for Managing IT Stuff That Relates To Students means that I should be the primary liaison between Us and Them for just about everything related to these funds. However, what I actually got to do there is take minutes; which is particularly redundant, since my officemate Financials Girl also takes minutes, and always has. This was also true for the last one I attended, in November.

(I was not invited to the February iteration. However, $OVERBOSS thought I actually was there, and had taken minutes. I should point out that I wasn't invited to today's, either: on Thursday he asked if I was coming to the meeting, and I said "what meeting?" "Oh, you should definitely come." Well, okay, whatever.)

The meeting began inauspiciously with The Faculty Gadfly--someone who has a certain amount of understanding & study of technology, and is not at all afraid to share it as publicly as possible (faggot hackers: assume Thor)--commenting that the last meeting's minutes can hardly be said to be "minutes" at all, since they did not accurately reflect what was said, and who said it, and what discussion occurred about it. $OVERBOSS responded by burbling on about how "the people taking the minutes can't always keep up" and "don't always know who's saying things". This, when Financials Girl and I are sitting there on either side, laptops open, busily typing away, so it's not as if there's some question of who he could possibly mean by this obfuscation of names. Why, thanks so much for the public show of support! Thanks so much for saying to the Provost, the Registrar, the Head of Student Services, and various faculty that we, who are likely to have to deal with them in sundry other transactions, can't even handle taking notes! (And completely regardless of the fact that, on my part, I wasn't even at the meeting in question; and that he had rewritten the whole thing, so it may not have been her fault either.)

I'm going to take this to $ACTUAL_BOSS in our weekly meeting, and strongly represent my sense of insult. I probably should take it to $OVERBOSS directly, but I rather expect it'd go in one ear & out the other.

Am packing books at the moment. I've just packed Dad's Tolkien box set, and for some reason that makes everything seem much more real and much less theoretical.

(It's this edition, which I had a devil time finding an image of. Apparently it's some kind of rarity now; who knew? But I certainly love it best of all, even though I do quite like the Alan Lee and Ted Nasmith illustrations found in more recent editions.)

Just for reference, when we last moved house, we had 40+ boxes of books between us (and a lot more have been acquired since). I'm going to keep under ten, and ideally under seven, for going forward. So far I have two of sewing and medieval-reference, and two of Other Books. Of course, I haven't started on my graphic novels yet; but they weren't in the original 40-box tally, either, SO THERE.

Edit: Oh, and a box of RPG books, chiefly Champions. Though the D&D stuff has not begun to be divided (if it even matters, since it's mostly 3.0 and 3.5 edition, and 4th is coming out next month) (not to mention a lot of it is Forgotten Realms sourcebooks gotten for a now-defunct campaign, and neither of us is hugely interested in that particular setting).

We're still having a Memorial Day weekend party: it will be Saturday, though, instead of Sunday per usual (since other parties are partying on Sunday). The usual 2pm - Last Dog Is Hanged. Expect email anon, but this is just to mark your calendars.

The pool is only about 63 degrees, so I expect only a few of us crazy types will jump in, but there it is.

PISCES (Feb. 19-March 20): In their lust to prove there's no God, atheists
often invoke the existence of suffering. "What kind of deity," one asked
me, "allows a child in Darfur to starve to death after seeing soldiers kill his
mommy?" While I don't claim to have the authoritative answer to that
accusation, I think it's worthwhile to consider the possibility that suffering
is a gift God gives us in order to prod our evolution. On a personal level,
your longing to escape your suffering is a primal force in making you
smarter. On a collective level, nothing refines and ennobles us more than
our passion to keep others from suffering. For every dead child in Darfur,
100 people in other places on the planet have responded with a radical
commitment to create a world in which future Darfurs won't happen.
These are worthy ideas for you to meditate on in the coming weeks. You
will have a tremendous capacity to convert your old wounds, as well as
the old wounds of others, into brilliant opportunities.

(I went last Wednesday. I was strapped for time, I was out of sorts and out of rhythm, it was more labor than usual, and I was next to some bint wearing about a gallon of perfume making it impossible for me to breathe. The less said, the better.)

Maintained same speed, same duration. No perceived improvement in overheating. I'm a little more winded today, but I think that's as a result of no workouts Thurs, Fri, or weekend (other than moving boxes), and possibly from a larger-than-usual dose of cat dander on account of staying at nedlnthred's last night.

The gym was surprisingly crowded today. I hope and trust this won't extend into summer.

No idea on weight. I suspect I've maintained, as things aren't feeling particularly bigger.

And now, the back window of our car has been smashed out. As it sat at its ease in our suburban driveway, at that. Current best guess is that the neighbor's landscapers' mower kicked up a rock or something, but who knows? No witnesses.

Usual five-minute warmup on an exercise bike.

Modular shoulder press: 2 reps of 10 @ 3lbs
Lateral pull-down: 2 reps of 10 @ 37.5lbs
Lateral raise: 2 reps of 10 @ 2lbs
Leg extension: 2 reps of 10 @ 2lbs
Fly: 2 reps of 10 @ 1lb (This was easier today.)
Low Pull: 1 rep of 10 @ 2 lbs, 1 rep of 10 @ 3lbs
Assisted chin-up: 1 rep of 10 @ 115lbs.
Assisted dip: 1 reps of 10 @ 115lbs (These were both harder than usual, I think because the low pull does some of the same muscles.)

I feel somewhat, well, worked, but not direfully so.

So all the years I was working in ISP-land, I was jealous of the other kids of my acquaintance who got to go to things like Usenix and SANS and Black Hat and what-not.

Then, I come unto academia, and I see that practically the whole department, it seems like, flits from conference to conference like bees amongst the meadow flowers. "Ah hah!", thought I, "now it's my turn, at last." But then I stopped to consider: what sort of conferences would I go to? Managerial training? It might be useful, indeed it probably would be, but the thought has all the allure of a trip to the dentist...without promise of a lollipop. My role isn't technical enough, really, to get to go to the tech conferences, so that's out--though now that I stop to think, I realize that I didn't truly want to go to learn all about Revisions to Wireless Protocols or A New Way Of Looking At Kernel Hacking; I wanted to go because everyone else was doing it and it sounded like a good time. This is the wrong reason to attend a professional event, it seems to me.

Ergo, a theory: Gauge your interest in a particular career path based on whether the idea of a conference pertaining to that profession is something you greet with excitement and anticipation. So far, the only thing that springs to mind is Kalamazoo, which I've been like the poor kid outside the toy store every single year since I first heard of it, and I swear to God I'm going next year. But I'll be on the lookout for others that strike a chord.

Addendum: I also pondered the fact that I always rejected a career in academia (I mean, on the academic side) because I am a rotten explainer and I'm afraid of public speaking. But as I start getting desensitized by these Godforsaken new student orientation, it's less monumental; and I wonder whether my Failure to Explain is exactly relevant--I wouldn't be telling them This Is How You Factor A Determinant, but sharing with them all the really cool shit I've learned about historical thing X. (...nedlnthred has been trying to get this across to me for several years now. Finally, the penny drops. I are slow.)

In which we keep a constant rate but increase duration, in this case 25 minutes. I was getting overheated, but not tired or breathless, and could have gone longer. (Well, the gym was closing anyways.) I don't know what to do about the overheating thing; the gym is temperate enough, it's just my messed-up coolant system at fault, and I am not clear on whether this is something you can improve. (I pause for elibalin to attempt to stick CPU fans to my head.)

I am, indeed, pretty sore from yesterday, but not intolerably so.