Life Stories: July 2003 Archives

What do these people have in common? They're both named Charles Taylor.

What do they not have in common? The guy on the left is "president" of Liberia and has been indicted for all sorts of war crimes. The guy on the right is my population genetics professor at UCLA who I hope to have on my PhD dissertation committee, and has not been indicted for even a single war crime. Both have worked in Africa, but the guy on the left spends his time brutally oppressing an entire country, while the guy on the right applies artificial life simulations to important humanitarian causes, like controlling malaria.

By digging beneath the surface, it's often possible to make this kind of astounding differentiation, despite initial similarities. Even though both men are named "Charles Taylor", one is a vicious killer and the other is a brilliant scientist. Sometimes certain groups will try to "sex up" surface similarities because they don't want you to recognize the underlying differences; it's important to carefully examine claims that two people or groups are equivalent.

Homework: Can anyone think of any real-world examples of this sort of deception, perhaps relating to American politics or international relations?

Class dismissed.

Wow, it's pouring outside. It may be no big deal to you easterners (anyone who lives more than 10 miles from the Pacific), but it's pretty amazing to me. I was getting ready for bed, minding my own business, when a crash of thunder cascaded through house; I could feel the earth tremble beneath my feet.

I paused, and looked around. The heavenly barrage hadn't been preceded by a flash of lightning, and I quickly felt ridiculous when I realized I was watching expectantly for one to follow. Nothing. Mostly silence; raindrops falling in my new aluminum gutters.

Good thing I didn't wash my car. That's how life is sometimes, isn't it? Metaphorical junk piles up everywhere, and you've got to deal with it, right? Ah, screw it; do it tomorrow. Or the next day. Or just wait a while and maybe it'll rain and all get washed down your shiny new gutters.

Ok, so Dean Esmay gets a stalker, Xrlq gets a stalker... what about me?! Aren't I stalk-worthy? I write lots of inflammable things, too! Someone better start stalking me right quick, or else.

I missed "Blog for Iran" day a few weeks ago (July 9th?), and I wish I'd had this story to relate back then. Not to be over-dramatic, but I won't use any names.

There's a guy who has been visiting our church for the past couple of months who just recently emigrated from Iran to America. He's Muslim, and a doctor, and most of his family is still back in Iran. One of our church members met him at a garage sale and invited him to come to church the following Sunday, and you can imagine our surprise when he actually came. He's very nice and friendly, and is always eager to share stories from Iran and to answer all the myriad of questions I ask him.

So last Sunday morning I noticed that he was recording the entire service on a digital camcorder -- not just the sermon, but the singing and announcements, everything. I nudged my neighbor and asked, "Hey, I wonder why he's recording the service?"

My neighbor responded, "He burns the video to CD and then sends it to his family in Iran."

Now, this fellow is not a Christian; he's certainly very interested and asks a lot of questions, but it's still amazing to me that he would take such a big risk just to expose his family to the gospel. I asked him later what would happen if his family is caught with video of an American church service, and he told me that they would probably be thrown in jail and have all their property confiscated.

I've asked him a lot more questions of course, especially about the recent uprisings against the mullahs. He says that the Iranian people really want America to get invovled, and that he personally doesn't think that the resistance against the government can succeed without American military intervention.

I'm going to try to talk him into writing a guest piece here on Master of None, so watch for it.

Ok, so it wasn't exactly my greatest moment, but it was an event that was instrumental in my decision to start blogging. I thought I had lost the picture forever -- Yahoo pulled the story down before I could save the image, and Google hadn't cached it (thanks for nothing, Google). But this afternoon, thanks to Google, I was able to find a site that had saved the image locally.

I'm the devastatingly handsome fellow in the brown jacket who is having his civil rights viciously infringed. Not shown: me totally flipping out and chopping the heads off of like 150 anti-war pansies.

Go read the account of my first (and possibly last) protest.

Some people at my work are unfamiliar with widespread social conventions. Let's review.

1. When entering an elevator, don't immediately turn around and stop as soon as you cross the threshhold, especially if there are ten other people behind you. Move to the back of the elevator so everyone else doesn't have to walk around you. If you have to get off at a nearby floor, get on last so that you don't have to push everyone else out of the way. Finally, if an elevator is crowded you may need to stand close to another person; however, when the elevator empties and it's just you and me left, you don't need to keep standing directly next to me. Thanks.

2. One easy way to know if a conversation is over is when both you and the other person say "goodbye" or "see you later". You may be completely insane if you often find yourself saying things like this:

"Ok, great then, see you later, how's it going?"

Normally this will be met with a blank stare, because I won't be able to comprehend what just happened. Are we done with the conversation, or are we still in the middle of it? Are you starting a whole new conversation with my retreating back?

3. Don't turn off the lights just because you are leaving the room. If there are still a half-dozen people inside, they will probably want the lights to remain on. One way to determine if there are still people in the room other than yourself is to simply remove your head from your butt and look around.

My main toilet was 100% clogged for about 3 days. I tried plunging it, but to no avail. I let the water in the bowl sit for a whole day and it didn't drain a single inch. I went to the store to buy Drano, but the back of the bottle says that it's not for use in toilets. The problem with using Drano in toilets is that the Drano can't get to the clog due to the trap design; I knew that if I could find a way to deliver the Drano to the clog, I'd be home free.

Note the winding path that the water has to follow when the toilet is flushed.

What to do? I thought of 3 options:
1. Pour in lots of Drano. If I could fill the bowl with Drano it would overflow into the trap below. This would probably take quite a bit of Drano, and I only bought one bottle.
2. Use a length of rubber hose to get the Drano through the trap. By pushing the hose down into the drain of the toilet and through the trap, I would be able to then pour the Drano down directly into the pipes. I expect that this would have worked quite handily, but I didn't have a suitable hose.
3. Apply the one bottle of Drano that I already had, and then plunge it down to the clog. I knew this would be the easiest method, but also the most dangerous. Drano's active ingredient is sodium hydroxide and it has a pH of around 13; if you've got enough to fill a bathtub, you can dissolve a whole human body in a few hours and it'll go right down the drain.

I decided to go with option 3. Normally when you plunge a toilet you want to try to pull the clog towards you (i.e., you use more force pulling the plunger up than pushing it down), but since I wanted to move the Drano to the trap I did the opposite. Insert Drano; plunge plunge plunge. Within a few minutes, the drain was clear! Huzzah!

As an added bonus, my toilet was incredibly clean from all the Drano sloshing around inside. In the future, I may use Drano to clean all my hard surfaces.

I know everyone is wondering where I've been for the past three days, and you probably assume that I've been partying like crazy. That's an easy assumption to make for anyone who knows me, but in actuality I've been working all weekend. In fact, let's see... today is the 29th day in a row that I've worked.

On the plus side, all the managers were on vacation for the 4th of July, so I was actually able to get some work done. Now that it's Monday we're back to the three hours-of-meetings-per-day routine (no joke). It's amazing to me that managers at a technology company don't understand how engineers work. Meetings suck my life force, and it can take a considerable amount of time and concentration to get back into the engineering groove; by the time I'm actually being productive again, it's time for another meeting.

So, I look forward to working on the weekends; come to think of it, I'd happily trade weekends for having Thursday and Friday off, as long as management kept a regular schedule. It's very frustrating to be kept from doing real work due to meetings and administrative nonsense, even when it's only the necessary amount of nonsense. At times like this, however, when there are [counting on fingers] 8 managers for every 3 engineers on the project, it gets to be a bit suffocating.

I've managed engineers (before all the recent layoffs) and it's really not hard to coax productivity from productive people: give them clear, unwavering directions; leave them alone; repeat.

I've been very busy today because everyone wants to leave for the 4th of July weekend. We had some errors pop up during our testing last night and I've been spending the day trying to track down the cause, while everyone just wants to hit the road ASAP. Fine.

A problem arises, however, when management insists that, although they don't know what is causing the error, they know it's a problem with the software because the hardware never fails. Sigh.

I tell them what I think is causing the problem, but they don't believe me. It's not like I'm as smart as them, after all, or else I would be in management. So I spend 4 hours demonstrating that I was, in fact, correct, and then another 2 hours documenting the problem so that they can understand what needs to be done to fix it. One of our EEPROM memory units has a failure and needs to be replaced. I get back to the office from the lab and hey, everyone has gone home.

The best part is that I get to come in over the weekend to fix everything.