I offered myself up for five more interview questions almost two weeks ago, so here goes. Thanks vinny. For the questions and your patience.
1) You find a baggie of marijuana in your 15 year-old son's room. What do you do?
Do my best not to overreacte. My wife and I aren't exactly angels ourselves, so it's best to keep that in mind. Especially my wife!! But never mind about that.
The baggie gets confiscated and a long conversation needs to take place. By this time, both my wife and I will have certainly talked to him about the dangers of drugs and alcohol. I want to know where he got it and why he went against our wishes.
Since it's (hopefully) his first offence with us, we'll have a fire in the backyard that night and toss in the whole bag. I might crack some joke about staying out of the smoke, but I want him to see his money going up in flames.
I'll let him know that I trust him to do the right thing in the future, but any subsequent malfeasance will be dealt with much more harshly.
2) Describe your perfect weekend (Friday after work to Sunday night) without spending a dime.
Well, I leave work early to start off. Let's say about noon. That doesn't cost anything; not even a whit of guilt. Thankfully, I just filled the truck up with gas that morning, so I've got about 600 km in there if need be. And it's the middle of summer, by the way. My wife has already dropped our son off at Granny's house for the night. We'll pick him up tomorrow sometime.
Friday night is a home-cooked meal, lasagna, a bottle of blush wine and a movie on the DVD player. Not Star Wars, I guess, but nothing too sappy either. This is followed, now that it's dark enough outside, by taking a big blanket out into the backyard and finishing off the bottle of wine in front of the fire pit. Complete with s'mores. That's right; blush wine and s'mores. Whatever ELSE may happen out on the big blanket in the backyard by the crackling fire under the full moon and the influence of alcohol is left to the reader's imagination. I hope you have a good imagination.
Saturday morning sees us waking up to bright sunshine and the freakin' dog is STILL in his doggie bed at the foot of our own. He didn't crawl under the covers. Nice.
Bacon, eggs (any style) and hashbrowns are on the go for breakfast while my wife and I lounge in our bathrobes. She gets inadvertently wide-eyed from time to time and finally blurts out, "How did you DO that last night?" I simply smile mysteriously, give her the last piece of bacon and discretely pluck a stray blade of grass from her hair.
After completing our morning routine, we jump in the car, a la Dukes of Hazzard, and head to Granny's house to pick up our son. We're invited in for a cup of tea and then, having made arrangements a few days earlier, drive down to Red Deer to meet some friends for lunch. They absolutely insist on buying, and we spend a few delicious hours engrossed in conversation regarding our families and pick sides in the contentious 'Did Han Really Shoot First' debate.
Driving back to St. Albert, the boy is asleep in the car all the way and he awakes cheerful and playful when we arrive home. I spend a couple hours playing peekaboo with him while my sultry wife makes a nice light supper. (I ate too much at lunch.) The three of us, avec chien, then go out for a good long walk on the various foot paths that inundate our little city. There are plenty of others out along the mighty Sturgeon River (you could wade across it in about ten steps) and we stay out until the sun begins to set.
I splash around with my son in the bath for half an hour, then read him a story while he nods off to sleep. My wife and I then spend a couple hours, in lawn chairs this time, out by the fire and roast a few marshmallows. The neighbours see our merry blaze and invite themselves over. They bring some Corona. As we bid them goodnight, my wife tells me she has a surprise for me tomorrow.
Sunday dawns pregnant with anticipation. Our son has slept in past 8 AM and I can't remember feeling so vigourous. Not since Friday night, anyway. I pester my wife about my surprise, but she remains mysteriously aloof. So I go about my Sunday routine of making scratch pancakes for breakfast. After the last bit of syrup is sopped up I hop in the shower and sing most horrendously to an audience of none.
After getting dressed, my wife approaches me in the living room with a Mona Lisa smile on her face. I stand still; wary. She drags a single fingernail from my throat down past my sternum and looks up at me through fluttering eyelashes. "Do you want to know what your surprise is?" she queries. Just at that moment, the doorbell rings, revealing a small car-load of friends who have made an unexpected visit.
"Hey Si!! You ready?!" I know not for what. Amy finally reveals that she has invited a few folks over for a Sunday Star Wars Marathon!! Score! Starting at noon, we sit down to watch all six DVDs of the Star Wars saga. (It's the summer of 2006, so I can do this.) This takes us well past midnight. We skip dinner, having filled ourselves with copious amounts of junk food. By the time Luke Skywalker looks contentedly at the ghosts of Yoda, Obi-Wan and Anakin in the Ewok village on Endor, only me and one other are awake to witness it. My wife and son have gone to bed hours ago, and it's just the last litre of Mountain Dew that has allowed me to survive this rigour. We all end up sleeping in the living room.
Monday dawns with my wife making a 'sick' call in to work for me. I nap until close to noon, and then go about making my morning ablutions. The house slowly empties and I finally kiss my wife and son goodbye as I endeavour to make it in to work for the latter half of the day.
And to top it all off, just as I'm heading out the door, I bend over and pick up a shiny dime that just happens to be lying on the ground. Sweet.
3) George Lucas wants to give you any one Star Wars costume for your own personal use whenever you want. Which do you ask for? (To be worn by you! We already know how you feel about the gold bikini.)
I didn't need that picture in my head at all. Thanks.
It sounds like the obvious choice, but I have to go with Darth Vader. I'd love to come to work and tromp around the hallways spouting off lines like, "All too easy," or, "You don't know the POWER of the Dark Side!"
A close second would be Luke's outfit that he wore while training to be a Jedi with Yoda on Dagobah. It's a rather nondescript, practical uniform. BUT, it would give me the opportunity to put my son in his back-pack carry-thingy, paint his face green, put some 'Spock' ears on him and carry around my cool Force-FX lightsabre.
4) What is your favourite equation?
I haven't really thought all that hard about math in quite a long time. Pythagorus did a wonderful thing for geometry with that whole sum of squares deal. (a2 + b2 = c2) Right triangles have never been the same since.
It took me a while to appreciate the simplicity of Mass In = Mass Out of a stable chemical process.
Thinking back to my latter two years in university, I have to pick the equation that reflects unsteady state heat transfer from a cylinder:
This is not due to the inherent elegance of the equation itself; it looks really rather cumbersome, doesn't it? But my heat transfer course in university was made more enjoyable by the fact that the above was taught by calculating the length of time it would take a beer can at 4 degrees Celcius to warm to room temperature of 20 degrees. Similarly, we used an equation to calculate how to cook a steak in a convection oven at 250 degrees Celcius to medium-well.
Now THAT made engineering fun!
5) What has been the most elaborate practical joke you have ever been involved in (as designer, participant, recipient or other)?
Since we're coming up on April Fool's Day here, this is quite appropriate. And from what my mind can recall, I need only go back a year to answer this one.
Just last April, I wanted to prank my office. I thought of targeting a single person, but then began to think a little grander. Why not do the WHOLE office? Like, everybody? That'd be way funner.
So I enlisted the complicity of my then eight-month pregnant wife and we drove back to my office at about 8 PM when we were sure the only people there would be us and the cleaning staff. Since pretty much everybody in the office is 97.2% reliant on electronic devices, those were our targets.
All mouse balls were removed or had optical sensors covered.
All telephones had their receiver buttons taped down so there would be no dial tone when the handset was picked up. Overtop of this was affixed a note that read, "Important!! Do not remove: phone system upgrade in progress, please call John Smith for removal at extension XXXX." The added bonus to this was that John Smith (not his real name, gasp!) had just started with the company in our IT department that week and was inundated with calls all morning. On his phone in particular I taped a message that just read, "Welcome to The Company."
Some enterprising folks realised that they could still use their speakerphones, so phone conversations were overheard all over the building for the entire morning. Many questions were asked, but the culprit never came out of the woodwork.
Which reminds me, April 1st is only a few days away...
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