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
Filed Under Miscellaneous | 2 Comments
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.