Simian Farmer

31

It's pushing midnight here and tomorrow is my wife's birthday.  I've left two cards for her on the kitchen table.  One is, ostensibly, from the dog.  I wrote it with my right hand to look more authentic. 

I stopped by the grocery store on my way home from work this afternoon to be sure I got some blueberries.  (Frozen; 'tisn't the season for fresh berries in Edmonton.)  Amy loves my blueberry chocolate chip pancakes.  I use my grandma's recipe; from scratch.  None of that store bought batter crap.  Dad and stepmum are coming over for Saturday pancake birthday brunch.  Should be nice.

Then Granny and Grumpy (Mom and stepdad) are coming over to watch the squirt while the two of us head out for a dinner.  Alone. 

This will be the first time in nearly seven months that Amy and I have been out together away from our son.  This is way past due.  Ten bucks says that Amy starts talking about the boy before we even get to the restaurant.

Happy birthday, my Love.

What does your heart tell you?

Today, Friday, 19 November 2004, represents the 6-month mark before the release of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.

Just 181 days to go.

Anticipation is the best sauce, and I'm looking forward to a banquet unlike any other I've experienced.  I know it would suck if I were just setting myself up for disappointment here, but I can't help it...

Milestone

As milestones go, this isn't very significant. 

But at 2.40pm, Mountain Standard Time, I received my 1,000th page hit since this website's inception.  That was like two months ago.  Break open the bubbly. 

Next milestone: 10,000

Boredom

I was away from work for Monday and Tuesday of this week.  I had signed myself up for a Cost Engineering course at a hotel in downtown Edmonton.  The course outline looked like it had some relevance to certain aspects of my work.

I was wrong.

It turned out to be two days of mostly monotony wherein our two instructors stood at the front of the small seventh floor room, backlit by the omnipresent glow of the Powerpoint presentation, and droned on about such topics as Cost Containment, Best Value Assessment, Authorization for Expenditure and Fixed Asset Management.  There were a few islands of interest, amidst this sea of ennui, when one of the instructors would regale us with personal experience pulled from one of the many projects in which he had been involved whose success had hinged on accurate cost engineering.  These were few and far between.

There were fifteen male attendees in the class and both instructors were also men.  Women, apparently, aren't drawn to the cost engineering field, or at the very least have better sense than to attend a two-day course on the topic.

Midway through the second morning, I began to doodle.  I became more entranced by the random blue lines my pen was making around and through the words on the page than I had been to date with the words themselves.  And given my wont for logical and organised thinking, my doodles began to take shape.  I drew a cube.  Inside that cube I circumscribed a circle, whereby one point of the circle touched each of the four sides of the square.  I then thought to myself, you know, the ratio of the surface area of the larger square to that of the smaller circle is a geometric constant.  Let's figure out what that ratio is.

The diameter of the circle was equal to the length of the side of the square, so this ended up being quite easy.  The ratio is: 4/π   
I was very pleased with initial success.  So now that the steam train was going, I wanted to build up a little speed.  I drew a circle and circumscribed a square inside of that.  The diagonal of the square is equal to the diameter of the circle.  So, given that the diagonal created two right triangles, Pythagorus came to my aid to determine the length of the sides of the square.  The ratio of the area of the larger circle to that of the smaller square was then: π/2

This is where I started to get really crazy.

Not content with a 2-dimensional world, I decided to branch out and explore the realms of 3-D.  I was nearly unstoppable.  I sketched a cube.  Inside of that I drew a circle that represented a sphere, touching the cube on each of its six sides.  Similar to my first problem, the length of one side of the cube was equal to the diameter of the sphere.  A couple of simple volume formulae resulted in the ratio of the volume of the cube to that of the smaller sphere to be: 6/π

This is where it started to get a little trickier.

I drew a sphere, and inside that transcribed a cube wherein all eight corners of the cube made contact with the surface of the sphere.  Cost Engineering had gone by the wayside.  Powerpoint was merely the glow by which I guided my pen on the page.  The only voice I now heard, no longer the Scottish brogue of the instructor from Cuthbert & Smith Consulting Ltd., was the one inside my head, driving me on to complete this fourth geometric conundrum!

It was no longer so easy...  The diameter of the sphere could not be related directly to the length of one side of the cube.  The diagonal of the cube was the answer to that problem; but how to relate the length of the diagonal to the length of one side of the cube?  For that, too, is a geometric constant.  Pythagorus again to the rescue!!  I needed to use his theorem twice this time instead of once.  More circuitous was the path, and more rewarding was the fruit of this labour, let me tell you.  The ratio of the volume of the sphere to that of the smaller cube became:  (π√3)/2

I sat back, basking now in the glow of the screen at the front of the room as well as that of the success of my mathematical meanderings.  I tuned back in to the lecture taking place in front of me, realizing that the rest of the world, or at least the rest of the room, had failed to take note of my prowess.  No matter.  I was content without the accolades.

I came back to work yesterday realizing that I had earned 16 Professional Development hours over the course of the first two days of the work week, several of which had been spent contemplating the geometric relationships of doodles on my paper. 

What the hell was up with THAT?!

Pet peeves (part 2)

I didn't think I would write part 2 to my Pet peeves so soon.  I was sitting in front of my computer at home the other night, mentally jotting down the first elements of my peeves, and I thought to myself, five is good.  I'm pretty sure those are my big ones.  And as peeves go, they're pretty minimal.  So I posted them for all and sundry.

As I was completing that post, there was a teeny tiny voice in the back of my mind that was telling me I had missed something.  And I was missing something important.  "You're gonna kick yourself when you remember it," this voice was saying.  And today I remembered.  And kicked myself.  If you swing your leg back at the knee quickly enough, and you have a modicum of flexibility, you can kick your own ass with your heel.  Try it.

Three Letter Acronyms.  My peeve is not with these creations themselves.  Truth be told, I delight, in moderation, at the fact that the phrase itself could be reduced to one.  In much the same way that I delight in reading the word 'monosyllabic'.

No, my peeve is with people (and I'm a strong proponent of the axiom that 'people are stupid') who colloquially misuse them.  By this I mean people who say things like: PIN number, SIN number, ATM machine, PDF format, and the like.  I want to reach behind these people as they are saying these things to me, cock my elbow just so, angle my hand in the plane perpendicular to that of the floor, smile disarmingly, and then smack them upside the back of their head.  I want to say, "Look, don't you realize that the 'N' actually stands for 'number' and you're just being redundant?"

I don't say this, though.  And I restrain myself from the head smack, which would almost certainly be reciprocated.  It is not so much this particular peeve that bothers me.  I think it is more the fact that (the English) language in general is casually abused so much.  It reminds me, now that I think about it, of how I just recently mentioned that television is a tool that has not lived up to its potential.  It's not the tool; it's the uses to which people put it.

I'd hate to see a lightsaber in the hands of Jar Jar Binks.  Similarly, I mourn the fact that a tool as eloquent as language is used as nothing more than a hammer more often than not.

And to clarify my point about 'people are stupid'; I also think that any given person is not.  You as an individual possess, no doubt, more redeeming qualities than those for which I would subconsciously condemn you.  It's when a person gets together with other persons that they then become people.  I know.  I can go from 'person' to 'people' very quickly.

And do you know what else is delightfully ironic?  I'd love to get a 300 inch, flat-screen, high definition, plasma super cool TV.  Now who's the tool?

Stirrings of life

I make it a habit to come in to work early.  I'm normally at the office between 6 and 6.30 AM.  This is not out of any masochistic desire to impress the heck out of the boss, but due more to the simple fact that I am more productive in the mornings and it's nice to be able to work uninterrupted for a couple hours before anybody else arrives.  Or at least operate under the pretense that I am working.  I am, after all, posting to my site right now.  I also then feel little to no obligation to stay a significant length of time after hours since I would much rather head home to my family at that point.  (Normally, in the early mornings, I answer what pertinent Emails I have and prioritize a To-Do list that, more and more these days, sits looked-at rather than checked off over the course of the day.)

Something that intrigues me is to sit and watch how the rest of the office comes alive between 7.30 and 8 AM.  For the first hour or so that I'm here, it's deadly quiet but for my own ambulation.  And then, in the space of half an hour, the building itself seems to stir and come to life.

The respiratory system starts with a premonitory distant hum, followed some seconds later by the first blast of stale air and settled dust from the heating vents.  The autumn sunrise, coming later this time of year, filters through blind slits, and as the beast begins to shake itself from it's evening's repose, its human inhabitants begin to filter in for the day.

This is what truly intrigues me.  Office lights are turned on, coffee is brewed, computers are fired up, papers are shuffled, photocopies made, phones begin to ring, faxes sent, intercom pages broadcast and an increasingly steady stream of human beans begin circulating through hallways and offices, carrying data, ideas, distractions and conversations to the various cells of the organisation.

Some employees are content to sit immediately at their desk and leave only when called to do so.  Others are loathe to spend more time sitting than absolutely necessary; taking whatever excuse to 'do business' elsewhere in the building.  Some people bring with them a certain vivacity to the work environment, infecting fellow coworkers with an effervescence they would not otherwise have had.  This is, almost unavoidably, balanced by those for whom trudging to the office is, in itself, an exercise in willpower; their work is a chore and each completed project the culmination of a monumental effort.

By midmorning, there is a certain equilibrium established, lulling noticeably at noon, and not quite picking up to the same level of activity for the balance of the afternoon.

If you can take the time to distance yourself from your own work for short periods throughout the day, it really is an interesting process to observe.

Pet peeves (part 1)

For some reason, I was thinking about some of the random things that bother me lately.  They don't bother me lately, the bother me all the time; I have just been thinking of them lately.  I should have been a little clearer there.

1. 'Schedule' - please pronouce the first three letters as you would in 'school'.  This has always grated on me.
2. Escalators - just because they're moving stairs doesn't mean that you have to feel obligated to stand and wait for the magical staircase to transport you to the top.  Were it an actual set of stairs, you would have the locomotive means to carry yourself to the top; an escalator is more an opportunity to travel more efficiently than stationary stairs allow.  I realize this means that about 90% of the people who use escalators irritate me.  So be it.  Allowances made for esteemed seniors, parents with small children and others for whom climbing the stairs would be more difficult than waiting.
3. 'Impact' - this one's even worse than 'schedule'.  'Impact' is a noun, not a verb.  (Well, it does technically have a definition as a transitive verb, but I don't like it at all.)  And 'impacted' should only  be used when referring to wisdom teeth or the effect that meteors have on planetary or lunar surfaces and what happened to Red Leader when he fired his proton torpedoes at the Death Star's ventilation shaft. 
   And Dictionary dot com has this to say:

Usage Note: The use of impact as a verb meaning “to have an effect” often has a big impact on readers. Eighty-four percent of the Usage Panel disapproves of the construction to impact on, as in the phrase social pathologies, common to the inner city, that impact heavily on such a community; fully 95 percent disapproves of the use of impact as a transitive verb in the sentence Companies have used disposable techniques that have a potential for impacting our health. ·It is unclear why this usage provokes such a strong response, but it cannot be because of novelty. Impact has been used as a verb since 1601, when it meant “to fix or pack in,” and its modern, figurative use dates from 1935. It may be that its frequent appearance in the jargon-riddled remarks of politicians, military officials, and financial analysts continues to make people suspicious. Nevertheless, the verbal use of impact has become so common in the working language of corporations and institutions that many speakers have begun to regard it as standard. It seems likely, then, that the verb will eventually become as unobjectionable as contact is now, since it will no longer betray any particular pretentiousness on the part of those who use it.

1. Comb overs - I have never, and I really, really, really mean never, seen any single man that looks good with his hair combed over his bald spot.  My maternal grandfather had a comb over.  I always thought it looked a little goofy.  I don't know where I first heard the term 'Winnipeg Whip', but it aptly describes what happens when the gangly length of hair is caught in an expected gust of wind.  It never looks good; all you're doing is broadcasting your insecurity.  If you're losing the do, don't try to hide it; go Picard.

2. Television - As a tool that has not nearly lived up to its potential, this one is hard to beat.  Soap operas, reality tv, 95% of sitcoms, hell, 95% of all programming.  I'd say that soaps are a major contributing factor to North American obesity.  The daytime tv-watching masses are like a sluggish stream: following the path of least resistance.  It's so much easier to park one's posterior on the chesterfield and vegetate until the spouse comes home.  If it's not news or Discovery Channel, I'm making disparaging comments.  (This is not to say that I, too, have not been a willing victim at times.  Sweet lure of the idiot box.)  Mind you, Discovery is catering more these days to lemming-vision than it used to.  It's a broad brush stroke, which most times I am loath to use, but I'll go so far as to say that television sucks.  Homer Simpson had it right when he stood up angrily and started banging on the side of his tv, "Stupid TV! Be more funny!"
   

That's good for now.  I need to go away and think positive thoughts so I don't get overly immured in certain of my peeves.  I really am a fairly positive person, these things only bother me in passing.

Choo choo!!

It's finally official.  I graduated from the University of Alberta with a degree in Chemical Engineering in 1999.  I have been working in an engineering capacity with the same construction firm for the past 5+ years.  And just on Friday, as I was leaving for the weekend, I decided to check my mail slot one more time to find that I had an envelope addressed to one Simon D. Fraser, P.Eng.

Before Friday, that would have been addressed to Simon D. Fraser, EIT (Engineer in Training).

I wasn't too sure whether I wanted to feel somewhat elated or moderately disgruntled since I had applied to APEGGA to see if they would deign to bequeath upon me the rank and title of Professional Engineer back in April of this year.  I have been waiting nearly 8 months for their reply.  So while I'm very glad I have attained this one milestone in my career, I was frustrated by the fact that it took so long.

And here I will say that I have certain opinions on various aspects of APEGGA and its methods of regulating the body of individuals of which it is comprised.  I will, however, choose not to air them in their entirety here since, and I do see the sweet irony in this, I am now a 'professional' and it would be unbecoming to broadcast these sentiments in a public forum.

Oh, and I also now have the inherent and near intoxicating power to sign passport photos.  Please form a line behind that crack in my driveway.  Thank you.

Randomness

New favourite word of the day: 'Pessoptimist'.

I still consider myself to be an optimist.  But that one struck a chord with me.  Mind you, it's a long way from replacing 'boobies' as my favourite word ever.  That one conjures up such soothing and succulent thoughts that I am already adrift in a sea of mental bliss as I sit here and type this with my fingertips while my mind and my lips are elsewhere.

I'm quite sure that I was intending to write something else here before saving the post, but it must have been washed away in the tide of bliss I was just dreaming of now.  Well, if it was important, it will come back to me and I will come back here...

Everything is proceeding as I have foreseen

Some lucky schlep got the opportunity to view the first 8 minutes (still rough in spots) of Revenge of the Sith.  He wrote a report that was posted up at everybody's favourite movie news site, Ain't it cool.

There are some minor spoilers, but not really anything that's not evident in the teaser trailer or the Sith video game trailer.  I'm positively twitchy at the prospect of a Yoda vs. Sidious lightsaber duel.  My ears are bleeding with envy right now.