Show MenuHide Menu

Frayed

September 28, 2006

Man, I’ve been busy. I had a milestone deadline on Monday, so I had been working like a dog for the last few weeks. I hadn’t realized that it was actually stressing me out until last Friday night, when Seppo surprised me with a copy of this:

It came in a jacket! Is there anything cuter? This is not a rhetorical question!

Ok, maybe these guys:

Via CuteOverload, of course.

I’m not here to argue with you. Anyway, the point is this: Seppo knows how much I love Grease. I love Grease! I squeal when the songs come on. I sing along, tunelessly yet enthusiastically. It’s one of my many charms.

Eager to take a break after my fifth 12+ hour workday [side note: Wow, that sounds so wimpy — I used to be able to do 14 hr workdays with my eyes closed. Oh wait, maybe I was sleeping.] I popped the DVD in to see what awesome goodness this new release of Grease was going to bring me.

When I played the first singalong (words appear karaoke-esque on the screen while the musical numbers play), I got really giddy and couldn’t stop giggling. Pretty soon, I had tears streaming down my face, but it wasn’t really that I was laughing so hard. I was so physically relieved from my constant stress by the act of laughing that I cried.

Yeah, it was really confusing. So yeah, I figured out I was stressed. LOL.

Since passing the milestone, it’s been much better. I work really well under a medium to high amount of stress. Under zero stress, I get a bit lazy. Under way too much stress, I apparently work insane hours then cry while singing along to John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John singing “Summer Nights”. That final falsetto is killer. I laugh every single time. Hey, but I get things done. I don’t think I’ve ever missed a work deadline.

Anyway, Seppo is really awesome when I’m under tons of pressure. He solves the dinner problem for us everyday, makes me feel really cared for, and brings me silly gifts to lighten my mood.

Thanks Seppo. 🙂

Podcasts I’ve been enjoying

September 18, 2006

I love these podcasts. Excellent.

I’m still trying these out.

I suspect these will be useful at some point.

Do you have any podcasts that you’d recommend? My one-way commute lasts about 50 minutes to 1 hr 20 minutes in general. Many days, I’ll listen to a Wait Wait Don’t Tell Me or a Word Nerds podcast, with a couple of the shorter ones thrown in. Since I’ve only recently started doing this, I’ve had a huge backlog to listen to, but frankly, I am going to need about 2-3 more weekly updating podcasts to round out my listening or I’ll run out. I’m still looking into books, but audiobooks are so damn expensive that it may not be worth it.

The ones I can download from the library only play on MS devices, so I tried to put one on one of my work devices, only to find that there isn’t enough on-board memory, so I’d have to buy an SD card (or use the one for my camera), which could be ok, if it weren’t for the fact that the particular device I have does not have a standard headphone jack, which means I’d have to buy some sort of an adapter (ETA: other than the headphone jack-to-tape deck adapter I already have for the iPod Nano) to listen to it in the car. Which all translates to more trouble than it is worth.

—

This morning, on the Word Nerds podcast, they discussed the various ways people equivocate: lingually (with words), paralingually (with non-word vocalizations), and non-verbally (without words, duh). I realized as they were covering both what equivocating (or prevaricating) is meant to do and how people do them, that I’d been conditioned by my mother to dislike paralingual (e.g. sighing) & non-verbal (e.g. shrugging) forms of equivocation but to engage ridiculously in the lingual forms, always diluting my statements with phrases like, “sort of”, “somewhat”, “maybe”, “perhaps”.

They also discussed the use of the active versus passive voice as applied to equivocation. I found it interesting that when I speak to people about things that could potentially be perceived as negative, I use a passive voice, (e.g. “There is a mistake in the code,” rather than “You’ve made a mistake in the code.”) fairly consistently, where as when I want to say something positive, I make it a habit to use the active voice (e.g. “You have great taste in clothes,” rather than, “That is a great shirt.”)

I don’t have a concluding thesis or anything. I’m still working out how this plays into my communication with others.

Musings

September 12, 2006

Movie: I watched In Her Shoes sometime last week (or maybe the week before). I had heard that it wasn’t marketed right at the time of release, and I can believe it. My guess is that it was publicized as a light-hearted “chick flick” (I hate this phrase and its inherent sexism so much — not that I think people who use it are trying to be sexist, but it’s a phrase with a lot of baggage that I think inhibits real meaning from being conveyed) when it’s actually a drama with some funny elements about familial relationships, in particular, that of siblings.

I could see where there were shortcomings in the execution of the story: the younger sister was made flat and virtually unsympathizeable too soon such that when her other dimensions are revealed, it was probably too late for most people to care; the older sister also suffered from a slightly similar issue; the love interests were sketched out too quickly, etc.

However, despite all the shortcomings, I really connected to their portrayal of sibling relations. Their hurts and sorrows felt real, their inability to remove each other from their respective lives despite the hurts made vivid sense. The way they tried to protect each other reminded me of my own siblings.

I really liked it. I might read the book.

—

Books: Speaking of books, I just finished the audiobook of Outlander [note: get this on iTunes instead so you can save time ripping it] yesterday. A few days ago, I had finished reading Life of Pi. Right after that, I finished reading The Reader.

I found interesting parallels in the story structure of Outlander and Life of Pi. While, overall, I found both of them to be excellently written books with a gripping story and engaging characters, I was bored to tears by the first section of both of them. Actually, that’s not precisely true; they were not in fact boring. It’s more that they seemed to move around aimlessly without a sense of direction or tension. They also didn’t make me grow attached to the characters. That happened much later in the books for me. So my interest lagged. It took me something like five tries over 3 years to get past page 70 of Outlander. It took me three tries over countless months to get past part 1 (of 3) of Life of Pi.

There is a lot of setup going on in those parts for both books. When you get to the end, you see how the setup really pays off, that the story would be missing something if you did not have the kind of setup you had. How do you reconcile those two things? On one hand, too much set up could mean that you lose the reader due to impatience at what feels like a story that is going nowhere and at times feel like an indulgent exercise on that of the writer. On the other hand, by the time the reader gets to the end of the book, the beginning makes perfect sense in the big picture and the pays off in terms of providing a consistent character base to build the story on is vast.

When I read, I want at every step of the way, one or more of the following:

  • Something that’s making me grow attached to a character
  • Interesting dialogue and/or action
  • A sense of direction/growth/tension (or resolution thereof)

You can’t, and you shouldn’t, have all of those things at the same time all the time. But if you can’t provide at least one of those things in most of your scenes or chapters, I think there is a real problem. There should be purpose to each and every scene. If there isn’t, if it doesn’t add anything to the greater whole, whether it is in terms of character development, insightful commentary, plot development, general entertainment, etc., then there is no reason to leave the scene in as-is. You have to edit as ruthlessly as an indie filmmaker on a desperate budget. Actually, I don’t have any info to lead me to believe indie filmmakers on a desperate budget are any better at editing than the bigwigs. 😀

The DaVinci Code had atrocious characters and dialogue, so much so I almost quit reading. But the movement of the plot was undeniably (to me, at least) engaging and was a page-turner. Both Outlander and Life of Pi kept me up until unreasonable hours of the night (er, morning) to finish them up because the stories had become so compelling and the characters so empathizable. Clearly, the beginning sections were not slow out of a lack of talent but by a conscious decision, perhaps to serve as a contrast. I’m not sure. But it bugged me.

The Reader was a very short, very sparse story and did not suffer from such an issue because the characters were instantly intriguing. It’s also worth reading.

—

Food: I’ve been obsessing about food lately. All I want to do is eat, cook, eat, read about cooking, read about eating. Luckily, in October, Seppo and I will be hitting up WD-50 and The French Laundry, so I’m all aglee. Is aglee even a word? Probably not.

On a completely unrelated note, it’s SANTOKU, people of Food Network and PBS, not santuko. I’m calling out Chris Kimball of America’s Test Kitchen and Rachel Ray on their consistent misuse (and even consistent misspelling!) of this word.

—

Work: I’ve mentioned this to a couple of people now, but I feel like now that I’m pretty busy at work, my brain is on fire. The vague sense of overall stress/looming deadline approaching has flipped some sort of trigger in my head and now I’m working like a dog, reading again like a maniac, sleeping a little less, playing sudoku obsessively, meeting with friends, calling people (ok, that’s like 1 call a week, which is a huge increase), watching tv, thinking about picking up another knitting project, and cooking up a storm.

When I’m not busy at work, I can barely motivate myself to go to work and eat whatever is in front of me. I think it’s like driving a manual: if you are driving around all day in second gear, you aren’t going to go anywhere fast and it’s gonna wear on your engine. If you gear up, you can go much faster and further with more efficiency. Something, work this time, kicked my brain into a hgher gear, so I’m all woo-hoo.

Now I just have to be careful to not burn out.

Light

August 31, 2006

On the book arena, thanks to Stephanie’s suggestion, I hopped on over to BookMooch, where I started to poke around. This led me to click on a link to LibraryThing, a catalogue and recommendation website, where I opened an account to try to put a dent into my list of owned books. As I entered my third author, Donna Gillespie, the search revealed that she had another book coming out!

Let me tell you a little about this author. She’s only ever written one book, The Light Bearer. She took twelve years to research and write that book. It was published in 1994. The sequel, Lady of the Light, is finally coming out this year in November. I am so excited. I mean, I can’t tell you how exciting this is.

The first book was a carefully researched historical fiction about the Roman Empire, during the time when it was conquering the Germanic tribes. The main character is the daughter of a chieftain, who takes the oath to become a shield maiden at the age of sixteen, going on to be forced to become a gladiatrix. I couldn’t help but imagine Sophitia during her fight scenes. 🙂

I picked it up while I was in college. At the time, all I wanted was the longest book I could get for my money because, like most people, I was a broke college student. It was 1024 pages (the copy I linked is 800 pages, but it’s in a different format thant the out of print format I had originally purchased) for about $7.50, so I got it. The richness of historical detail is incredible. It covers the emporers from Nero to Domitian, who reigned about 100 years before Marcus Aurelius (I know you watched Gladiator). Each scene is so real that it feels as though you could reach through the paper and touch the characters, feel their pain of loss, their urgency in battle, their dedication to honor and dignity. Their need for independence and freedom is palpable — the author clearly illustrates why the characters value these things over even individual survival, even if you don’t, and how that can impact society.

I think I read this book around 1996 or 1997. Since then, I’ve been waiting for the sequel.

Since it’s been twelve years since the last book was published, I expect this second book to be just as well researched. I have to go into a cave and read the first book over again before reading the second one.

Thanks, Stephanie! 🙂

P.S. Don’t be put off by the cheap-looking cover with a woman that looks supiciously like Neve Campbell.

Libraries

August 30, 2006

Inspired by the post on books, combined with the fact that audiobooks and spoken word content seem to improve my commute, I poked around at my public library website for a bit yesterday, between waiting for countless builds of my code that won’t link (why won’t you link, damn you?!) and found that they, through some sort of partnership with NetLibrary, have electronic content (both ebooks and audiobooks) that I can “check out” from the library, from the comfort of my own chair! I see that I can’t put the audiobooks on my iPod but they’ll still be great for when I’m working at my desk.

In addition, it looks like I have access to all sorts of online references (such as “premium” access on Oxford Reference Online). Libraries have really come a long way.

I won’t be able to answer your comments because I’ll be getting ready to take my dinosaur for a spin around the block.

Books

August 28, 2006

On Tuesday, January 27, 1998, I listed on my website’s “thoughts” section my favorite books to date. They were:

At some point in 2003, I wrote in my Friendster profile that my favorite books were:

It looks like Remembrance fell off the list and Einstein’s Dreams took its place. Of these books, I’ve only reread Love Story and Outlander. The rest were one-time reads, but they affected me in a way that I can’t forget.

It’s weird; I had definitely read Einstein’s Dreams before 1998 when I made my original list, but it only made its way onto the list later. I wonder if it just became more significant to me as I changed.

I feel quite sad that I haven’t been able to add anything new from the last eight years to my list. I always think of myself as a voracious reader who loves both fine literature and easy, light reading for the sake of entertainment, yet, I can’t think of anything that moved me so much in the last eight years that I would consider it a favorite. The worst is that the last eight years is when I’ve spent the most money on books, too. The other thing is that while I consider myself a reader of diverse interests, I’ve mostly had only the “dessert” of the metaphorical literary [two words that perhaps should not be used in conjunction] meal in the last few years, with a decided void where the proteins and veggies should be. Erg. My theory is that I only seem to get to read right before falling asleep so I am never in the mood for thoughtful reading. So I have been trying to read earlier in the day whenever I have time, so that I have the brain-bandwidth to read other books. 🙂 Still working on Life of Pi! 😀

What books are your favorite? Which ones do you have on your bedside stand? Which ones do you always pick up with a knot in your heart? Are they the same?

Ei-Nyung is on a roll

August 24, 2006


Ei-Nyung is on a roll

It’s me… On a roll.

Clique Poll

August 23, 2006

Wow, I’m on a roll today. The entry I wrote about high school made me wonder what cliques or perceived social groups people I know were in during high school. Report them here! 😀

I’d also like to know what group your significant other was in, just to see how things have ended up in the real world.

Use the cliques found here and here.

Me: Advanced placement, church people/youth grouper, individualist, nerd, friend of orchestra geeks, Korean/Asian, tomboy, possibly student government (but not actually *in* student government), new wave.

Hmm, I need another list.

Being easy vs. Being helpful

August 23, 2006

In an email thread about where to have lunch, a friend tossed out three suggestions and asked the rest of us which place we’d prefer. I picked one of them and gave an answer right away. One of the responders said:

I’m easy… anything is good with me

The original suggestor wrote back:

No! You are not being easy!! Easy = Opinion!!

I totally agree. And I think this is something that is overlooked in a lot of group (or one-on-one, even) situations. When you have a lot of people who genuinely don’t care or want to accomodate the group, it can be that no one proffers a real preference.

The individuals involved may think that they are being helpful because they are willing to go along with any suggestion, but this is actually unhelpful because it doesn’t help move the decision along (whether it’s for where to go eat or whatever) and puts the burden of investigation and decisionmaking back on the one person — or no one at all.

When it comes to group decisionmaking, I like to do it this way: everyone takes turns making two or three suggestions, and then we see if there is an overlap. Then we go! Forcing people to make suggestions makes this process wrap up quite quickly, usually in a matter of a couple of minutes.

The worst is when one person makes a bunch of suggestions, and another person says that they don’t really want to go to any of those places but will if everyone else does.

Reality check: Al Bundy

August 23, 2006

Everytime I wax poetic about my high school, I think people must think I’m like Al Bundy and his stories of his glorious high school days.

Where is the “punch self” smiley?

« older entries    newer entries »