Calendar

Muffin Man is a great Facebook status writer. I've decided to take some of his status updates and try to turn them into a comedy routine. Here is a bit based on his update...

Well, it’s 2012, the year of a major political battle for the U.S. presidency, the year of the warmest January in recorded history, and the last year of existence as we know it, according to some. The Mayan calendar ends in December 2012. Since their civilization ended about a thousand years ago, I’d say their calendar did pretty well. I don’t see how we should get so worked up about the end of a calendar made so long ago, I mean, I buy a calendar every year, sometimes with motivational pictures of kittens, other times dramatic scenes from the Harry Potter movies, and all of those calendars end in December. That’s just what calendars do, they end in December. I don’t open my new calendar each January, flip through it, and then exclaim, ‘Happy New Year! See y’all at the apocalypse next December!’ What it comes down to is we have more faith in an extinct ancient civilization to keep the time accurately than we do in Hallmark…

Oreo cookies and graduate statistics

75% of me really doesn't like stats homework, the other 25% hates it. I started out with the 13 pages worth of questions in good spirits. I was answering questions with ease as I was remembering the French-accented Dr. Deltoid (yes, a nickname), my undergrad research methods professor, and all that I learned in his class. I remembered distributions and measurement scales; independent and dependent variables, even what between group and within group mean. It was almost a joy, until I hit the part where I was given data and needed to organize it and create charts and tables. You see, in my undergrad classes (stats and research methods) we were required to purchase a program called SPSS. I purchased that program and complained quite frequently about how slow it was. Well, it turns out that the program is a million and a half times faster than I am at creating histograms and frequency polygons in Excel, manually. Can you believe Excel doesn't have built in functions to automatically create histograms from a grouped frequency chart? I know!

Well, needless to say, but here I am saying it anyway, because this was the point of writing (negating the usefulness of ever saying 'needless to say' in any seriousness), I wish I had SPSS. I don't know if I still have the CD for the program or not. It could be in a box in my parents' attic, or possibly in a box about 10 feet from me right now, I don't remember, it could also be in a trash dump out in Idaho somewhere after I gleefully tossed it out when I left school. One of these days, perhaps tomorrow, I'll check the box here at the apartment to see if it is still in my possession, otherwise I'm seriously contemplating a 3 hour round trip to scour the attic for it. The alternative is to drop $60 for a new one year licensed copy. Come to think of it, that probably is the best option, I'll spend close to the same amount on gas driving to my parents' house. Even if I find that I do have the CD, I might not be able to run it because it is probably a limited use license and it has been a few years since I bought it. Well, such is life.

I'm glad to be finished with this assignment, and until I have SPSS, or until I look at what next week's assignment entails, I am going to be dreading week two of this class. At least I have some Oreo cookies to keep me energized.

Mixed Nuts

As I sat at the table after dinner my attention was drawn to the bowl of nuts left over from Christmas. The variety bowl of shelled nuts has served as a center piece/meal supplement for going on three weeks now. Next to it is a smaller bowl with the nutcracker and shell fragments. The process of shelling nuts has taught me a few things. First, I like the crazy looking nut that slightly resembles an alien spacecraft I saw on the X-Files or some such show once. I have no idea what type of nut it is, but i like it. The almonds are also good, but I think I prefer those smoked, or adorning chocolate covered coconut. The second thing I learned is that I will never again criticize or question the cost of shelled nuts you can buy in the store. Never again!

In the past, back before I tried my hand at cracking and shelling nuts, I often wondered why it cost so much money for a jar of nuts. But not anymore, no, not after realizing just how difficult it is to crack a shell and not smash the nut inside. Not after seeing how far the shards and splinters of shells spread explosively after making the first crack on the nut. I learned to keep on hand wrapped around the shell and to apply pressure more evenly, but they still shatter in an out of control fashion. By experiencing the work that each little tiny nut requires in order to spring the tiny morsel from its woody cage, I will never again question the $25 price tag on an ounce of macadamias. I won't wonder why you can buy a 5 pound bag of raw peanuts in the shell for $9 or a jar of raw shelled peanuts for pennies on the pound. In fact, I wouldn't even question if they started paying us to take the nuts in shells because it is so much work to shell them. It is probably cheaper just to give them away.

Well, this was a funnier thought when I was telling Taylor about it while cracking the nuts, spending minutes on extracting small fragments from the shattered remains. Your loss.

Its just a little dusty, its still good

So it's been over a month since I've posted on this blog. I threw a sheet over it to protect it from the dust that has figuratively collected on it. All is well. I'm still around, just working and doing school. Being productively busy. I figured it was about time to get something posted here again, so I decided to scroll the news headlines and report on something important. You know, really dig deeply into an issue and get philosophical or something. Here's what I came up with: (click on the picture for a complete view)

The elders of the internet know who I am?!

     I had forgotten how much busier I am when I have a job. It was a solid month between my last job and my new job, a solid, sweet month. Now I have a job again, and I really do enjoy it, but it takes up a lot of time. I am compensated for my time, and so the world keeps spinning, but it still is a lot of time. Blogging seems to have taken a back seat to living. Which is really a contradiction of terms for the whole purpose of this blog. That's immaterial. I'm blogging now, while simultaneously drinking vanilla something or other flavored granola from a small, green plastic cup.
     There is so much to write about, like my pondering on why we call wearing a costume for Halloween dressing up, while at the same time we call wearing a suit or formal wear dressing up as well. And when we wear sweat pants we call it dressing down. Think about the events you dress up for, job interview, church, funeral. Now think about the costumes you wear to dress up on Halloween, clown, psycho killer, skeleton. Now picture wearing each of those costumes in the order I mentioned them to the three events I mentioned, also in the order I mentioned them. It doesn't seem appropriate. Therefore, instead of saying "dressing up" to refer to wearing a Halloween costume, I suggest we start saying dressing sideways, or dressing crookedly, or dressing diagonally. Just a suggestion.
     I could also write about the things I'm discussing in my grad program. I'm only a few weeks away from completing this first class which I started in the Education program and have since decided to switch to the I/O psychology program. I need to finish this class and then I can switch. So for the time being we are discussing education and it is interesting. This week I read about Joseph Lancaster. He wrote an essay or treatise or pamphlet of some sort in 1803 regarding his thoughts on education reform. I liked what I read from the excerpts of it. I will, one of these days, read the entire thing and I think it will make me want to write a blog post about it. Along those same lines, I'm reading a book called "As a Man Thinketh" which I got free from Amazon.com for my Kindle. It is a fantastic read. I agree with everything James Allen has written. I think that is the author's name. Probably is. What? I'm drinking granola out of a cup! APA citations don't apply here! It's the Internet! Which brings me back to the title and a sense of zen.
     Today I nearly broke the Internet, at least for one small group out in the central time zone. I don't remember what state. You see, I work as a sort of tech support representative. Well, I got into trying to fix something that was well beyond my scope of knowledge and I broke the Internet. Or so we thought. Turns out I didn't really do something wrong, Windows did. So that was a relief, sort of. I still tried to do a corrective task that I really wasn't capable of doing. Such is the learning curve. I've only been there three weeks now.
     It did lead to a fun conversation with a coworker about how IT and tech support don't really need to know what they are talking about, they just need to sound like they do. For example, if someone calls me and says "Here's the problem" and I say "Oh my no! That's terrible, I don't have any idea what you are talking about!" the person will become concerned and worried. They are calling me because they don't know how to fix a problem, and they expect that I do. If instead of declaring that I'm just as dumbfounded as them, I say "I see, let me try a few things," not only do I maintain their expectation or hope in my abilities, but I also give myself some room to work. I say "a few things" meaning that I have several options to try, in case the first thing I try doesn't work. This buys me some time to poke around and happen to get lucky at finding a fix before they start to wonder if I really know what I'm doing. It's a thin layer of ice we walk sometimes.
     The key is to sound confident and use words beyond the common understanding of the layman. If you start losing it, and you feel like the person on the other end is picking up on your incompetence, you simply open a configuration file and start scanning the lines of text which to the untrained eye seem like a bunch of junk. You can win a lot of points by pulling off the "config file scan" appropriately. It looks impressive and puts the perspective that you know more than the caller back into the mind of the caller. It's just a big game. Computers are interesting. They usually do exactly what you tell them to do, but sometimes they don't. And that's an exciting and entertaining thing.
     If you are wondering about the title to this blog, locate the search bar of your favorite Internet browser, type in "the it crowd the Internet for Jen," the first YouTube result ought to be the one. Watch it. Laugh at it. Love it. The IT Crowd is a British comedy and it is highly humorous, although rather randy, just like most of their television programs. The clip I refer you to is clean.