Dec
22
No Really. This Is Going to Hurt.
Filed Under Miscellaneous | 7 Comments
When a doctor says the above words, you don’t really believe him. I assumed he was trying to scare me so that the ensuing experience would seem better in comparison to the nightmarish holocaust of pain my mind inevitably conjured up. Also, being a man, and therefore stupid, I mistakenly believed that I could handle the pain in Rambo-like fashion. After all, he cauterized a wound in his side by filling it with gunpowder, and then lighting it. I think his mouth might have twitched, but that was about it. How bad could a shard of glass in my foot really be?
In fact, a piece of glass, or a foreign body of indeterminate nature as it turned out, isn’t really that painful a thing. Getting it removed is. But maybe I should back up a little bit.
It was two days before Thanksgiving, and the wife was brushing her teeth. I walked into the bathroom and placed a glass of water on the counter. Now, my wife likes to gesticulate (flail her arms wildly) while brushing her teeth. I believe this is an attempt to communicate with me. (Why should valuable time be lost even though one’s mouth is full of toothpaste?) In this particular instance, she communicated the recently deposited glass onto the bathroom floor. We cleaned it all up, or so we thought, and everything seemed fine. Until the next night, when I sliced open the bottom of my foot on a shard of glass that we missed.
So cutting the bottom of your foot is pretty painful for a number of reasons, not least of which is that you then have to walk on said appendage while it’s healing. I did quite a bit of that, and continued to run on it in preparation for a 10k in Central Park. This, perhaps, was not my best idea. It became increasingly obvious, as well as painful, that there was something embedded in my foot. Fast forward a couple weeks and I’m sitting in a doctor’s office listening intently as he explains just how much an injection in the bottom of my foot will hurt.
Since the removal of a foreign body, it turned out not to be glass, basically requires the doctor to spend a bit of time “exploring” the affected area with a scalpel, he gives you a local anesthetic. As it should be obvious that the only way to deliver a local anesthetic is via injection, and the bottom of your foot is home to many, many nerve endings…well, you do the math. How can I describe the feeling? It was something like having a nail, studded with shards of glass, driven into your foot. Then, someone lights your foot on fire.
The doctor didn’t lie though. He said it would be exteremely painful, and he said it would last only a few seconds. He didn’t mention that those few seconds would feel like they went on forever. The experience has taught me two very important things. The first is that the next time something made of glass gets broken in my house I should probably just move. The second is that I’m definitely not Rambo.
Dec
1
My allegiance to Gang Green goes back to when I was six years old. Growing up in Westchester County, I had two teams to choose from: the NY Football Giants or the NY Jets. I can’t really pin down why I chose the Jets but I imaging it had something to do with the following: my father is a die-hard fan of Big Blue and I am something of a contrarian. Also, I think really fast planes are much cooler than really big people.
Unfortunately, my love for the Jets is unrequited. The Jets are an abusive spouse and their fans are the worst kind of enabler. Week after week, season after season, we come back—cheering, screaming, pleading—for glory. In the 20 years that I have been a Jets fan I’ve felt real hope on only three occasions. The first time was in 1998 when they made a legitimate run, going 12-4 in the regular season and making it all the way to the AFC Championship, where they promptly lost to the Denver Broncos. I didn’t expect much in 2002 when they had a 9-7 regular season, but then they beat the Colts 41-0 in the wildcard game and I thought that maybe there was a chance. Of course, they got trounced the following week by the Raiders, the same team that had crushed my playoff hopes the year before.
And then there was the 2006 season: The year of the comeback. It was Eric Mangini’s first year as head coach, the previous season they had been 4-12 and Herm Edwards had left for Kansas City. All I wanted out of the team was a better season. If they had gone 8-8 I would’ve been happy; at least they wouldn’t have been losers. But they surprised everyone with a 10-6 season, winning 5 of their last 6 games, only to lose in the wildcard round to the Patriots. Read more
Nov
25
Wrong Number
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Apparently, it is very easy to mistake my cell phone number for someone else’s. This has happened to me on multiple occasions. Here’s the most recent one:
“Call me when you can. Can Jake go to my sister’s house tonight with Brian and us? Call me. -Nanc”
I don’t know anybody named Jake or Nanc; I don’t even know anybody named Brian. Of course, this is not the oddest text message I’ve ever received. My favorite misdirected text has to be the following:
“I can’t stop thinking about you.”
That’s it. That was the whole message. What was the person thinking about me? Were they thinking, I can’t stop thinking how good looking you are? Maybe they were thinking, I can’t stop thinking how much I’d like to kill you? Was the person threatening me or professing their love? I guess I’ll never know. Plus, it’s kind of hard to explain to your wife.
Jun
18
Confession of a Reformed New Jersey Hater
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I was born in New Jersey. My family moved to New York when I was two. I lived there until I was twenty two. That’s twenty years spent living in the Empire state, right on the edge of the greatest city in the world. It would be a monumental lie to claim that I had anything but contempt for New Jersey for most of that two decade span. But after graduating college, I found myself back in New Jersey for the simple (and expedient) reason that this is where I got a job. In the last five years I’ve come to realize one incontrovertible truth: I was a real jackass when I lived in New York. The corollary that has come with this knowledge is that most people that live in New York (and even some that don’t, you know who you are) are still jackasses.
A New Yorker’s hatred, disdain, outright dismissal, etc. for the Garden state stems from a couple of factors. First, most New Yorker’s have only ever seen one piece of New Jersey: the stretch of New Jersey Turnpike between the George Washington Bridge and exit twelve. This is without doubt one of the ugliest strips of real estate in the known world. Second, New York beaches are disgusting, and the fact that the Jersey shore is superior is galling. Let’s examine these egregious reasons for New Jersey hating.
New Jersey is a small state. However, the “petrochemical and refinery strip” encompasses less than .01% of New Jersey’s almost 9,000 square miles. To make the claim that New Jersey is ugly because of that one small section is the equivalent of saying New York is ugly because you’ve driven on the Cross County Parkway (what it lacks in ugliness it makes up for in crime rates). Anyone whose driven further south than exit twelve knows that most of central and southern New Jersey is comprised of forest, farms, and hills. Quite a bit of it, especially in the southern part of the state, is empty. Areas like Princeton and Red Bank and portions (although certainly not all) of the Jersey shore are even picturesque. And that brings us to the second reason I mentioned above.
The Shore, as it is known in New Jersey, is vastly superior to almost all of New York state’s beaches. Now I know that someone is going to throw out the Hamptons as a rebuttal. Yes, the Hamptons are beautiful, but they are off limits for the vast majority of New Yorkers. Only two kinds of people are welcome in the Hamptons: people that own homes there, and guests of people that own homes. You will notice the conspicuous absence of people that actually live in the Hamptons. That’s not an oversight, those people aren’t welcome in the Hamptons either. So before anyone says something about how great the Hamptons are, remember that unless you fit into one of the aforementioned groups, you’re defending a region of New York that wants nothing to do with you.
Instead, let’s talk about the beach that a large portion of New Yorkers have actually been to: Jones Beach. Jones Beach is a wasteland. I think T.S. Elliot had it in mind for his poem of the same name. (This is called hyperbole. It’s not intended as a statement of fact, so please don’t make a comment to that effect.) It’s not a particularly beautiful beach. In fact, it feels kind of unwelcoming. Perhaps the biggest issue with Jones Beach is the people that frequent it. At least at the Shore I can laugh at the muscle-bound idiots with fake orange tans and hair out of a Dragonball Z episode. At Jones Beach, well, let’s just say I’m happy I’ve had a hepatitis vaccination. On occasion, I’ve felt that I could actually benefit from a bout of temporary blindness. Quite frankly, the Jersey Shore, including Jenkinson’s (many a fun evening has been had at Martells and if someone has the temerity to suggest Water Taxi Beach as an alternative they clearly suffer from brain damage), is superior, at least in comparison to what New York has to offer.
I’m sure that this entire post will be roundly ignored by most New Yorkers and will have zero impact on their opinion of the Garden state. I’ve come to recognize that while New York City may be the greatest city in the world, the people that populate it can be anything but. So, this entry is my apology for all my many years of Jersey hating. The notion that New Jersey is called the Garden state for a reason may have taken me along time to arrive at, but I got there eventually.
May
6
It should be readily apparent that the title of this post is a corruption of the old axiom, power perceived is power achieved. It is unfortunate though, that my version is also applicable. Whereas the perception of power can translate into actual power (Learned Helplessness, Stanford Prison Experiment), the same is not true when it comes to the quality of professional services. The key component in this discussion is mode of dress. To put it bluntly, why does a suit, as opposed to a t-shirt, equate to professionalism? The distinction, while not wholly arbitrary, is still false. When one individual makes a value judgment based on another’s clothes, they are participating in what the technology industry would refer to as a “legacy” system. (Legacy systems are pieces of software/hardware that are outdated/outmoded, but that you still have to deal with.) The belief that professionalism is somehow related to clothing is a perfect example of a legacy system.
Where once the cut, color, and quality of a person’s clothes determined their position in complex social hierarchies, no less prevalent in America than in Europe, it now determines status in corporate hierarchies. Presumably, the “better” one’s position, the more it pays, and hence, the higher the quality of one’s clothing. In the professional world, the suit (for men and women) is the garment of choice. The more expensive it is, the more well known (in the appropriate circles) the designer’s name is, the higher ranking its wearer. Whether the person wearing the suit got their job through nepotism or ability, brown-nosing or acumen, is irrelevant. When that individual steps in front of a room to make a presentation, or a sales pitch, or deliver a closing argument, the first judgment the intended audience makes is based on appearance, of which clothing is a major component.
Why do we persist in this fallacy? Some would argue that initially, the only metric by which they can gauge the individual in front of them is appearance. I would ask why any judgment is being formulated at so early a stage. It would be far wiser to take that proverb, “Don’t judge a book by its cover,” which is perhaps one of the first such truths that we learn and no less valid for being a cliche, to heart. The only thing that matters, is the final product; whether that’s a good defense or a piece of complex software doesn’t matter. The clothes someone was wearing when they delivered that final product aren’t even worth mentioning. The thing is, many, let’s call them casual professionals, never get that far.
My office, for example, is very, for lack of a better phrase, casual. But to say that is a commentary only on how we dress; to take it any further does an immense disservice to the extremely talented men and women with whom I work. Most of us wear a t-shirt and jeans on a regular basis, yet when we meet with clients, we still have to play the game and dress “professionally.” And although we are being hired for what we produce, not how we look doing it, to get the job in the first place, we have to conform to the accepted mold. And that, quite frankly, is ridiculous. I have serious doubts that humans will ever evolve beyond our propensity for snap judgments and fascination with appearance, but I guess I can still hope.
Apr
22
“That is a big cat,” the vet said.
“Big as in, large, or big as in, fat?” I asked.
“Both,” she replied.
“The other one is just as big.”
“Hmm.”
It was at that moment that I finally accepted the truth, my cats are gargantuan. The vet’s pursed lips and disapproving look said it all. Apparently, I’m not fit to rear cats. I wonder what that says about my ability to raise humans? Make no mistake, I agree that my cats are big boned. When they lay on their sides, they look like beached whales. If they were in cat food commercials, they would be plus size models. But let’s face it, no cat food company wants a nineteen pound animal in their commercials. Who would buy food that makes their cat look swollen? On the flip side, if someone ever opens up a Big and Round apparel store, my pets will clean up at those auditions.
The thing is, I’m pretty attached to my cats, and if something were to happen to one of them, I’d be more than a little upset. (Something already happened to one of them, but he recovered, sort of.) We’ve tried different foods, cutting back on their portions, etc. But every year, when I take them for their annual physical, they’re a pound or so heavier. The vet told me to cut their daily allotment in half. We started that about two weeks ago, now one of them spends most of her day laying next to the bowl and tapping it with her paw. If you go into the kitchen, and she’s not already in there, she follows you, just in case you might be thinking of feeding her. I thought the other one was okay with the whole thing, but this morning I walked into the kitchen and saw him staring at the food bowl. They had already cleaned it out. He didn’t acknowledge me; he just stood there, as if he could will food to appear.
Perhaps they’re right. After all, don’t I have an implied covenant with the cats that I will take care of them, and that in return, they’ll be the embodiment of unadulterated awesome (this is how the wife and I refer to anything that our cats do that is cute, brilliant, of passing interest, not of any importance whatsoever, etc.)? Starvation, which is, I’m sure, how they would describe it if they had vocal chords, and brains capable of higher thought, is not a part of our tacit agreement. And yet, I know that helping them lose weight is more important than their efforts to make me feel bad. It just doesn’t feel that way.
Mar
23
A Series of Unexpected Expenditures
Filed Under Miscellaneous | 5 Comments
We used to have Roman shades in our living room. You know what Roman shades are even if you don’t know what they’re called. Here’s a picture to help you out. Basically, a Roman shade is a series of pleats that collapse or expand from the bottom up as you raise or lower the shade. They look nice and are neither cheap nor ridiculously expensive, depending of course upon where you purchase them. Unfortunately, I have something else in my living room, two cats. My cats, as felines are wont to do, enjoy chewing on just about anything, paper, plastic, tin cans, and of course, string. Roman shades work on a fairly simple principle, there are n number of strings running vertically up the back of the shade through rings, then across the headrail through eye-hooks, where they are bundled together at one end and form the cord for manipulating the shade. Now imagine what happens when one, or more, of those strings is cut, or in my case, chewed through. Maybe one side of the shade goes up, or maybe both ends but not the middle, there are many possible permutations to this, depending on the number of strings that have been severed and the number that are still whole.
It would be rather stupid to just fix the shades (something that is actually pretty simple to do) and then rehang them because the aforementioned felines would just ruin them again. So, after restringing the shades, I hung them in the bedroom where they are no longer in danger. This means, however, that I need to buy new shades for the living room so that the people in the apartment building across the street can’t see what we’re eating for dinner and watching on TV. Of course, now there are restrictions: the replacement shades cannot contain any exposed string. Last I checked, they don’t make shades out of chain mail. We finally settled on roller shades that have a metal chain for raising and lowering the shade. After I put them up, we enjoyed a solid twenty minutes of watching the cats chew on the metal chain, thankfully to no effect. Round two to the ones with opposable thumbs.
However, the title of this entry contains the word “series,” so obviously there’s something else to talk about. What makes item number two so much more irritating than the shades, is that it was a toilet. Toilets should not break, and in fact, they rarely do. Typically, if there’s something wrong with your toilet, than there has always been something wrong with it. Most toilet issues can be solved easily as they usually involve one of the moving parts inside the tank. It takes about a minute to replace a decaying flap, adjust the length of the chain, or the position of the flushing arm. For something more serious, say replacing the entire flushing mechanism, it takes about twenty minutes. Clogs can be handled with a variety of tools, ranging from drain cleaner to plungers. What you can’t fix, and so of course is the problem I have, is a cracked bowl. We’re not talking something huge, like say, the crack in the Liberty Bell. No, we’re talking about a hairline fracture, not even visible when you look at the toilet. Of course, the bowl being completely empty all the time is a dead giveaway that there’s something wrong with the porcelain throne. This kind of problem is not fixable; you have to replace the toilet.
Fortunately, or maybe unfortunately, we’ve owned our condo for less than a year and the developer is still doing work in the building. We seem to be playing the game where they stall until I get frustrated enough to take care of the problem on my own. We’ve been playing this game for a couple months now. First, I called over to the management company and told them the issue. They sent their plumber out to take a look. He told me, “The toilet bowl is defective.” I’m ecstatic. Anyway, I then call the management company again (they never call me first, nor do they return phone calls) and ask what they’re going to do about it. “We’ll call the developer and see what they want to do,” is the answer. OK. A couple days go by, I call them again. “Still haven’t heard back from the developer. We’ll call again.” I’m thinking, thank god we have two bathrooms. Finally, they say they’ve ordered a new toilet and they’re going to come over and replace the broken one. When they finally do show up, they don’t have a new toilet with them because they want to check something else. As if it would magically have fixed itself. I’m sure there will be a different excuse next time.
I’m hoping that this time around, I won’t have to pay the expense of a new toilet. But I have no illusions that some other unforeseen issue isn’t right around the corner. After all, we just noticed that the washer fluid reservoir in the car is completely empty, even though I refilled it a week ago. The point is, there will always be something else. The number of “something elses” is proportional to the amount, complexity, and expense (typically, the more complex something is, the more it costs) of stuff you own. Like Murphy’s Law, unexpected expenditures are a fact of life, and sometimes it seems that you go from one issue to the next. Hopefully, you have enough squirreled away to cover whatever crops up next.
Mar
13
I’ve come to the, admittedly, shocking conclusion that I want to be a father, someday. If that statement seems somewhat ambivalent, than it accurately captures how I feel. Five years ago, I would’ve said, no children…ever. However, I’m known for making definitive statements that typically require a retraction at some later date. (One retraction was delivered no more than five minutes after the initial comment. Tasty fruit, anyone?) About three and a half years ago, my fiancee and I had “the talk.” If you are married, engaged, or planning to do either of the former, you know the conversation to which I’m referring. It’s the conversation in which the topic of little ones, religion, and which set of parents get you for which holiday is discussed. I’m kidding about the last one, maybe, but the other two are pretty important. Let me pause here and say this, if you are married and didn’t have that conversation, and don’t plan to, well, best of luck to you.
Where was I? Oh yes, kids and religion. They go hand-in-hand don’t they? People who are not religious have children, and then it suddenly becomes important, for both parties. Religious people, regardless of which religion they practice, already have children on their radar. It’s important to them that their children be raised in the same religion. Either way, the conversation is made easier when the two people involved share some similarities, such as wanting to actually reproduce and practicing the same religion. In my case, it was maybe to the former and yes to the latter, although most people who know me might disagree with the word, “practice” (I’m applying the term extremely loosely). Of course, my desire to not reproduce had been tempered somewhat by my nephew, who had made the concept of tiny humans cool, so long as they weren’t mine. In the end, my fiancee and I concluded our conversation with the agreement that we would revisit the topic of children in the future, where both the topic and the possible offspring should be.
I guess my wife knows me pretty well, because here we are, coming up on our third anniversary, and the thought of having children someday no longer makes me feel like spontaneously puking. When I walk through the park on the way to work every morning, I see a lot of kids playing and laughing and generally having a good time. Sometimes I smile. But I don’t think I’m ready yet. After all, my wife and I still refer to any future progeny as spawn, and the other day, when she used the word baby in the same context as us, I got a little nervous. Then there’s the fact that a friend of mine, recently married with no kids, detailed what I thought was a hilarious method of punishment: Lock a kid in a dark closet with a rubber hose and the sound of a rattlesnake. I think that’s funny, in a purely theoretical way, today. When I stop thinking its funny, I’ll be one step closer to being ready to have kids.
The most telling thing, however, may be how my wife and I seem to be taking these steps toward our very own miniature human (any child my wife and I produce will be lucky to top out at 5′5″) together. We were in a Ski shop recently and I saw the tiniest pair of mittens I’ve ever seen, when I pointed them out to my wife, she said, “Those make my uterus hurt.” My uterus didn’t hurt, probably because I don’t have one, but if I did, I’m sure it would have. Instead, I had all these great mental images of teaching my kids to snowboard, taking them to soccer games, inducting them into the lifelong suffering of being a NY Jets fan, whatever. I thought about watching R rated movies with them after making them swear not to tell their mother (thanks, dad). I think sometime, in the no longer distant future, I’ll have to retract my initial statement on reproducing. What’s more, I’m pretty sure I’ll be happy to do so, but not yet.
Mar
1
B.A. English or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Code
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How did I become a software developer? I think the best answer would be, by accident. How does one become a software developer by accident? It’s quite simple really, just follow these three steps: major in English; display no interest in journalism, marketing, or advertising; try to find a job. It should be fairly obvious that I left out one of the primary endpoints for English majors, teaching. My mother was a teacher, my wife was a teacher; notice the past tense. My mother’s teaching experience started off well but was plagued by years of bureaucratic indifference, mismanagement, and ingratitude. Nonetheless, she stuck with it for her entire professional career, that is until she was diagnosed with breast cancer. The connection between stress and cancer is still being studied, and if you’re that interested in the subject, there’s a fact sheet here, and a more recent NY Times article here. My wife lasted four years at her job, long enough to get tenure and become thoroughly disenchanted with the anti-meritocracy that the teaching community strives so hard to maintain. My mother’s experience caused me to view teaching as a profession of last resort, my wife’s experience convinced me that I should stay as far away as possible.
So where does that leave a recent grad and his freshly minted B.A. in English? Grasping at anything and everything that comes his way. I worked for a whopping $0 at a New York startup magazine for awhile. They covered commutation costs though. When the magazine decided to slim down after its first three issues failed to generate enough readership, I was asked to stay, but still not offered a salary. I was seven months out of college, I wanted to move in with my girlfriend (she’s my wife now), and I really wanted to move out of my parent’s house. I said no to work without pay and parted ways with the magazine. But something very important did happen during my time there: I had my first brush with programming for the web.
Like many developers that don’t have a CS or MIS degree, I came to programming through web technologies. It started with HTML, then CSS, then JavaScript, and then it stopped. Leaving the magazine meant an end to my self-instruction in web programming. I’d made a start, but it would be another six months before I would do anything programming related again. In that time, I got a job with an eKnowledge (that’s supposed to mean something, but it doesn’t) company, moved out of my parent’s house, and in with my girlfriend. The latter two were by the far the more important to me, and if the job wasn’t as interesting as I’d hoped, at least I was getting paid.
So here’s how someone really gets into software development:
Boss: “Have you ever done anything with a technology called Flash?”
Me: “Not really.”
Boss: “OK…Do you want to learn?”
Me: “Um. Sure.”
I bought a book; I spent a week with a developer in Houston who gave me a crash-course in programming fundamentals. Flash, and its proprietary programming language, ActionScript, were my real entry into software development. ActionScript is a middle to lightweight programming language. Languages like C,C++, and Java are the heavyweights. Earlier versions of ActionScript bore more than a passing resemblance to JavaScript, a lightweight language used in web programming. ActionScript has gone through several iterations in the few years that I’ve been working with it, becoming more robust and application oriented. The latest version is modeled on Java, effectively moving it into the middleweight category.
The upshot of all this: I learned to code and built a few small web applications. And that’s how I got hooked on programming. I left eKnowledge-land for a small startup in Manhattan, building web delivered applications, and managing and mentoring several other developers. I’m still learning though, making forays into Java and server-side development. After all, being a software developer, much like majoring in English, is a constant learning process; maybe that’s why I enjoy it so much.
Feb
25
Welcome, I think.
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If you’re here, well, maybe you have too much free time on your hands. What can I say? Everyone else seems to have a blog, so why not me? To be quite honest, I’d never really thought about it until a recent college alumni event, where, to no one’s fault but my own, I had to repeatedly explain how I became a software developer after graduating college with a B.A. in English. The answer to that question will probably be the subject of a future post, but for now, back to the topic at hand.
In the past, I consoled myself by saying, “I write everyday…I just write code.” Now that sounds pretty bad, on multiple levels, by anyone’s standards, but it’s especially bad for someone who once had aspirations, and maybe still does, about actually seeing something published, on paper. Since I find that my trite little saying is no longer comforting, here we are. It’s not paper, but it’s a start.
While I have neither a degree in philosophy, nor years of enlightening experience on which to draw, I will still subject you to my ruminations on, as Douglas Adams so eloquently summed it up, “Life. The Universe. And Everything.” I have no idea what common theme, if any, my posts will contain (hence the Douglas Adams quote). In truth, my sole goal is to write something other than code, although I might post some of that here as well. I reserve the right to be as all over the map as I choose.
On another note, you may be wondering about the origins of the title of this blog. It is in fact a bastardization of an incredibly obscure quote from the movie, Aliens. That doesn’t actually explain why I chose it though. First, it is from one of my favorite movies. Second, the phrase is completely ambiguous when taken out of context. Is it a question, a statement, a command, something the receivers coach shouts to his wideouts before they take the field? It has a different meaning dependent entirely on punctuation and/or inflection. Finally, and this is a sort of corollary to my second reason, the phrase, even without punctuation or inflection, has many possible interpretations: be aware of your surroundings, be conscious of your choices and their potential outcomes, look out for the 6′, 190 lbs. cornerback that’s about to ruin your day, just to name a few. So there you have it, a few words with a lot of potential; I hope this blog has some as well.