pavao.org -- you wish you had it so good

10:21 Tuesday 16 August 2005

Dear People Getting Married,

I love irony. I think it's very funny. I'm not sure if it's because of some sort of mean, sarcastic, or bitter streak, or because I grew up on BBC reruns on PBS, but I do love the irony.

I've been to a bunch of weddings in the last year or so, more this past year than any previous year of my life. I've been peripherally in on a few of the plannings. I've listened to the music. There's one theme I see in many of these weddings, and that is a single song that everybody seems to want to have performed at their ceremony. This song is "The Water is Wide," an Irish folk song about love.

Okay, that should be your first hint right there. It's an Irish song about love.

It has a simple melody, as Irish folk songs are wont to have. The first verse is quite touching, with equally simple lyrics: "The water is wide, I cannot get o'er, / And neither have I wings to fly, / Give me a boat that can carry two, / and both shall row, my love and I." Or some such lyrics; it's a folk song, after all.

What saddens me (and delights me from an I-love-irony perspective) is that nobody bothers to do any further research. The rest of the song is about betrayal, loss, and sadness. It features such fine lyrics as "So did my love prove false to me," and "But love grows old and waxes cold."

Now, some would say the last verse is about hope, because it mentions the return of the narrator's love. I'm no expert in Irish folk songs, but I suspect when this glorious reunification is predicted to occur "When cockle shells turn to silver bells," and "When roses bloom in winter's gloom," the outlook for such a reunion looks rather bleak.

The best set of lyrics I could find are at this site about Ireland.

So, if you're planning a wedding, especially your own, please look into the songs you're actually asking for. Don't ruin your wedding just to entertain me.

15:10 Friday 05 August 2005

Calling All Lab Rats

Here's the deal. They've reassigned the classroom to the math department, so I'm going to have to teach all of my classes in the lab. The problem with this is that the lab isn't set up for classes very well. So, the plan is to reconfigure the lab to make that easier. And to do that, we need people to help move stuff and brainstorm how exactly to get the job done. The reward is za for lunch, on me.

We're getting together initially on Monday the 8th at 10:00 at the CSL, and on later dates as well until the job's done.

Current and former students are invited, too. Feel free to spread the word, if you like, but please keep it to former and current students and Lab Rats, partially because they're more familiar with the CSL, but mostly because I don't want to feed an army.

UPDATE: Thanks to the dozen or so of you that showed up to move things around. It was much more than I expected, but we got the whole thing done in one day where I thought the job may require two. Thanks again.

09:53 Monday 04 April 2005

You Can Buy Stuff from Me

I created a little virtual store at a web site called 99dogs.com, a site that allows you to design, buy, and sell your own t-shirts. It's kinda like on-demand printing, only for clothes and stuff (they've got teddy bears and hats and things). I got the store cuz there were some t-shirts that I wanted that nobody sells. Some people have seen these shirts and wanted one of their own, so I gave them the URL, linked above. Enough people have asked, so I'm putting a permanent link on this site, down at the bottom.

In the interest of full disclosure, I offer the following. I get a small kick-back for each shirt, like a buck or two. I spend this money on stuff for the CS lab at work, so it's for a good cause.

18:02 Wednesday 23 March 2005

My Lame Superpowers

I have two super powers. Generally speaking, that's cool. The ability to do things that few people can do is nifty, but when it goes beyond what are considered normal human capabilities, that just rocks. Or it's supposed to, anyway. The super powers I got are pretty lame. I have two of them.

The first super power is that I can detect the approach of precipitation a few hours before it arrives. This would be an amazingly useful super power in, say, 215 C.E. Nowadays, there are people who can accurately predict precipitation a few days in advance. Consider the conversation: "It's going to rain soon." "Yeah, I saw the weather report last night." Not impressive. The kid who picks up To the Best of Our Knowledge on her braces is way more interesting than I am.

The other super power is the one that has me cringing. I can smell things. From far away. Or that nobody else can smell. I occasionally recognize people by their scent before I see them. I can tell if someone has been smoking, toking, or drinking. I know what chemicals you put on your body, whether it was perfume, nicotine patches, or moisturizer.

Now, you might be thinking that this isn't such a bad power to have. Imagine, though, being able to amaze people with all these seemingly intuitive or fantastically deductive conclusions, and then when asked how it's done, having to explain that you have a sensitive nose. Your secret identity is Super Schnoz. But that's not the worst thing.

I can smell things most people can't. Pheromones being the scariest example. Don't get me wrong, sometimes it's great: there are pheromones that are quite intoxicating. Imagine, though, a world where you know everybody's mood, or at least have a pretty good guess. There are things about the biochemical and hormonal state of people that I don't want to know. And no, breathing through my mouth doesn't help.

Which brings me to what got me thinking about all this. Spring is in the air, or soon will be. That means thoughts will be turning to places on which people can get their freak. To top it all off, I work in a high school full of hormonal teenagers.

Ah, well. Short of investing in nose plugs or disfiguring my face, there's not much I can do about it. I'll cope, this year just like every year previous. But if you see a masked hero in green tights flying overhead, please back off on the perfume.

10:09 Friday 04 March 2005

Kids Say the Darndest Things

I've added a page to the site called "Overheard at the CSL," a listing of quotes and conversations I've heard at my job. Well, mostly just the stuff I thought was funny.

11:31 Friday 11 February 2005

An SCA Rant

I've posted a mini-rant on the SCA page of this site. It's not here because it won't really have any bearing on people who aren't in the SCA. So yeah.

But at least I can say my site's updated.

13:30 Wednesday 11 August 2004

If it's Tolkien, it must be moving day.

When I move, I play my copy of Rob Inglis reading J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. It's a good diversion, and keeps my mind occupied, where in the absence of having something read to me, I'd be constantly reading things I found and was supposed to pack up. I'm finishing up the unpacking now, and I'm just starting the Two Towers, so I reckon I've been moving at a good pace.

Not that any of this might be interesting. Mostly I'm posting something here to show that I'm alive. I imagine things will be kicking off apace once the school year starts again. I'll be back in the lab again this year, making geeks as best I can. I'm hoping to go 100% paperless this year, we'll see how far I get.

Next week is Gen Con, and of course I'll be there. My co-conspiritors and I will be running Live Role-Playing Chess again this year. I'll try to post something like a report, although the week after is the last week before school starts, and I've got prepping to do.

21:32 Monday 14 June 2004

I will never again make fun of racing drivers

NASCAR drivers are rednecked, tobacco-spittin', hootin' and hollerin' people who can only turn left and scream "yeehah" a lot. That's the stereotype, anyway. It takes no brains to drive a race car, just some driving skill, right? I'm no longer so certain of that.

Part of Brian's bachelor party (an amazingly well-crafted thirty-hour experience built by Michael and Alan) was a trip to Chicago Indoor Racing. Now, a Bowman Pro Kart is not, by any stretch of the imagination, a vehicle fit for NASCAR or Formula One racing. However, it's a loud little machine capable of speeds of up to 35 MPH, which is plenty fast enough when the only thing separating your rear from the concrete whizzing by beneath is a fiberglass seat and two 32mm chrome-molybdenum rods and there's a plastic fuel tank between your legs. They gave us the basics of driving and the rules, and released us onto the track for three qualifying races each (which took four actual races to get the ten of us) and a "grand prix" of the top nine of us.

The first lesson I learned was that there was a thing called a "racing line" that represents the route around the track that would offer a driver the best speed. Mostly, it is a series of curves that are as wide as possible that cut as close as possible to the tip of each corner. I'm certain there's a geometry to it. It takes some time to figure out where this invisible line is, and then to figure out how to stay on it.

The next lesson I learned was that everybody else had also learned the first lesson. This presented a problem in that in order to increase one's ranking, one must pass the driver to the front. We were not allowed to occupy the same space as another driver's kart by both the facility staff and the fundamental physical laws of the universe. If everyone is on the same line, how can there be any difference between the start position and the end position?

Here's where the thinking part of racing comes in. A driver must push the vehicle to its limit in speed while maintaining the invisible line, at the same time watching for an opportunity to capitalize on any error or deviation from the magic line by the driver ahead, and avoid any similar mistake to keep the driver behind from taking the same advantage.

Eventually, I even learned to watch the situation ahead of me, studying how the driver took each corner or anticipating possible collisions between drivers (something that allowed me to jump up two spots in the last race). All this while taking corners as fast as possible and wrestling with the manual steering. Given the speed at which one must make decisions and the need to anticipate one's opponent, I've discovered that racing is more akin to fencing than to stereotypical hickery.

So, the next time I'm tempted to say "look at the silly widdershins-obsessed hillbillies" or the like, I'm going to remember that I was, for a very short time, something of a race car driver, myself, and that these men and women are, indeed, participating in a sport.

Oh, and if you're wondering how I did, I qualified for position seven of nine for the grand prix, and finished fourth in that race. I finished the day with a racing score of 99.99, whatever that means.

17:52 Sunday 23 May 2004

Aaron finally gets around to putting something on pavao.org

That's right, folks. I have finally started putting up some content on the site. First and foremost, of course, the front page, being the page you are currently looking at. Then, I'll have to get on to the other bits, including all of the pages linked to from the pretty navigation menu in the upper left-hand corner.

Ultimately, this site will have a number of things on it, including the requisite self-description, links, and the like. I hope to put something useful and/or worthwhile here at some point, although some of my web designing time (which is, by the bye, something I don't pretend to be good at; I stole much of my design from highprogrammer.com) is being spent on the web pages I am designing for my job at work (that site is here if you're really curious, but be warned, it's not yet linked from the outside world, and with very good reason).

Eventually, I'd like to turn this site into something of a blog. Right now I'm doing it all by hand, but eventually, I hope to get something that will automate the whole thing. More on that later, along with righteous props for the person who actually made the automation script.