Articles from: 2011

You are lying in bed.  From your laptop, you scroll down your website slowly, the large brown letters beginning each post drifting to the top.  Seeing a pattern emerge, you fall asleep. You awake the next morning with an idea.  Grabbing the nearest piece of paper on hand you scroll down the website tallying the first letter of each of the 115 posts.  You feel the need to Excel this data.  You are a professional after all:   (Your tally totals 116 posts but you shrug your shoulders and say, “Close enough.”)  But wait!  Suddenly what has been in the back of your mind this whole time dawns on you.  Not all letters have an equal percentage of being used as the first letter of the word!  A letter could be used frequently just because it appears often at the beginning of words.  A quick search on Google reveals a Wikipedia article on first letter frequency.  You remember the reserve model you use at work, how it modifies incurred claims to remove the variation caused by workday fluctuations, and after consulting with your very smart team lead Sean, you divide the actual frequencies by the weight of each letter and multiply by the average of the weights to remove the inherent first letter frequency of the English language:   (Looks quite similar but again you shrug your shoulders).  Just as you suspected!  Too many I’s.  You talk about yourself way too much.  You are self absorbed and the evidence is overwhelming.  What have you done!  Is there any possible way you could stop talking about yourself so much?  You begin to wonder about other modes of narration ….

This is definitely one of the better movies I’ve seen in the past few years.  Racing Dreams is a documentary centered around these young go kart racers competing in a national championship and I guess these kids have their own struggles with family, finances, and figuring out what they want to do in life.  I had these struggles too, but somehow they were a lot less charming and endearing in my late twenties then they are for these kids in the movie. I think my tastes in movies have changed a lot from ten years ago.  In Philly I’d go watch the latest blockbuster every weekend with my friends and now I see only a handful every year.  I think I’ve become somewhat of a movie snob too, dissing movies for being formulaic or conventional. Anyway, I’d recommend this movie, even if the thought of preteens going around in circles on a track doesn’t appeal to you.  I give it two thumbs up!  Four stars!  Ten balloons!  Forty nine elephants!  Three hundred seventy grams of orange juice!  Bah, these scales are all arbitrary anyway.

I’ve become impressed by the note taking abilities by people at the church that I go to.  I see people who take the neatest notes using multiple colored pens in the fanciest journals.  The notes I saw yesterday were so meticulously tidy, I had to lean in and squint just to make sure her journal notes weren’t typed.  And I sat by someone who was using an iPad too (and realized one good thing about the glass keyboard was silent typing). In comparison my sermon notes are pretty lackluster.  I just use the sheet of paper they give us.  I don’t take a lot of notes when I’m studying for exams (although I do type up a cheat sheet for myself to review, which I think is more than most do).  I guess the bulk of the studying is the practice problems and sample exams.  Hmm, maybe they should pass out some of those at church, although I’m thinking a multiple choice question like, “Which of the following are signs of hypocrisy?” would be too easy.  I guess like the Society of Actuaries’ exams, the real tests are more tricky.

So I swung by the grocery store today and picked up some water and strawberries (they were on sale) and noticed my cashier’s nametag read “Red.” My favorite color is red!  My car is red and I have a backpack which is red!  I have lots of clothing that’s red!  My strawberries are red!  “Is your name really Red?”  “No,” he said. It turns out it was just a nickname.  I guess you can put anything on there.

I added a little progress meter to the top as a visual reminder of my progress through the ASM manual for my next exam, which is in June.  I think I could spend a few hours tweaking the progress bar design-wise, but then I probably wouldn’t get much studying done today.  I watched a video at work yesterday that told me that visual metrics aid in completing goals but I like to make things pretty so making the bar look nice is like a goal in itself for me.  Maybe I need a progress bar for redesigning the progress bar! This is my second thorough run-through the manual.  It’s quite a hefty tome so it looks like it’s going to be more of a long marathon run than a short jog through the park.  Failing Exam C is like completing a marathon and then having to do a do-over from the start because your shoes were untied midway through.  Not very fun.

I had to take last Thursday and Friday off because I felt pretty sick, and have been, for the most part, bedridden since.  I was thinking it was food poisoning from this ramen I ate but who knows.  I still feel a bit weak and my throat feels like sandpaper when I swallow but other than that I’m fine. There’s not a whole lot to do when rolling around in agony so I resorted to youtube and stumbled upon this comedian I thought was really funny, named Emo Phillips.  I thought his unique voice sounded familiar so I looked him up and it turns out he actually did some voice work for Slacker Cats, one of the projects for which I animated, back in the days.  It was neat seeing the person behind the voice, especially remembering all the scenes I did with his character.  I also youtubed Slacker Cats to reminisce. Another youtube video which brought back memories was this 80’s promo video for Microsoft Excel called The Soul of the New Machines (26 min. in 3 parts).  My dad got this video when we first got computers and I’m not sure why but I must have watched this video quite a bit (it’s still pretty entertaining, imo) since I still remember the corny guy, that chews gum a lot and has his coworkers notice how fast he reads to which he replies, “I got a high baud rate.”  I think I’ll probably remember that line for the rest of my life. And now I use excel pretty much every day at work and have turned into a relatively corny guy that snaps his fingers while spouting off one liners like, “Oh Yeah!”, probably to my coworkers dismay.  Maybe I should have watched less of that video.

I got a hot water heater the other day.  It was one of those things that everyone told me I should get because of its convenience and I must say it has been just that but the first cup of tea I made was really tough.  First I found some tea I thought I’d like at the korean supermarket (It’s Gogi rice tea) then I had to get the hot water heater, then I had to wash it, then I brewed two batches of hot water to rinse the container, then I brewed my final batch of hot water and poured it in this plastic cup which promptly melted, then I went out to get some styrofoam cups at 7-11 because I just threw away a mug I never thought I’d use, then I brewed my first batch of tea.  It was pretty good and I have a cup of hot tea in front of me in this old company thermos.  I must say tea, and hot water, are some of those things that I never thought I’d be much of a fan of when I was younger but have grown to love.

I’ve been pretty under the weather the last few days after a mild hiking excursion on Saturday.  It was getting a little nippy toward the end and I was feeling the chills after church the next day.  I haven’t been able to take much time off work to recover, due to deadlines and all, so I’ve been returning home and hiding under the covers while sweating, shivering, coughing, blowing my nose, and tossing and turning due to my legs which ached because of the hiking. I haven’t been sick for awhile.  I’ve been taking these gummy vitamins and the fact that they taste like candy is incentive enough for me to take them on a regular basis.  You’re only supposed to take two to get your daily allowance of vitamins, but the kid in me wishes they were less potent, so you had to eat 20 of them to get your daily dose.  Required gummy snacks as part of a healthy diet?  Yes please!

I still have yet to open this wedding save-the-date I received, particularly because when it was handed to me for some reason I thought the envelope was recently licked and I didn’t feel like touching saliva at the time.  I think I’ve waited long enough (dried saliva is muuuch better) and probably should open it. Actually I’m finding I tend to do that with certain letters.  I think I like the idea of hiding an unopened letter in a drawer somewhere to later open it, perhaps brightening a rainy day or something.  I guess letters these days are so much rarer that they kinda feel special.  I still have a letter I wrote to myself when I was in Mexico a few years ago on a missions trip with my church.  Although I think I can almost recall the jist of everything I wrote which kinda deflates the tires of any surprise that opening this letter may have caused.  Not sure when I’ll open it. Come to think of it there are a lot of letters like bills I don’t open immediately so maybe it’s just procrastination after all.

Today I ran into (figuratively) this post I thought was interesting, from Dr. Varner who teaches the sunday school I’ve been attending the past few weeks.  Last sunday he said we could “Romans 8:28 someone to death”.  That particular verse says that God works all things for the good of those who love God and have been called by Him and I suppose Christians sometimes use it in a swiss army knife type way to try to comfort those who are suffering.  Anyway, I don’t normally hear people use verses as verbs either.  Which reminds me, I probably should Ecclesiastes 5:12 myself soon after I … hmm, does anyone brush their teeth in the bible? I’m sort of impressed he uses tumbr actually.  I hardly know many who’ve even heard of tumblr, let alone someone in his, um, age demographic (a bit older).  And yellow font on grey background, with white highlighted titles?  Kinda savvy if you ask me.  And 137 pages of posts?  Letsee, I’m on page four…