The Topic of Great Randomness

[Garrett Fitzgerald]

I got my brain broken last night at the convenience store. I paid for my food, and traded pleasantries with the clerk. Then he said:

"I really like your recording of celaphain."

I looked blank. "I'm sorry?"

"I really like the you did for Librivox. I actually have it here under the counter."

I was completely boggled. I'm not used to having online and offline collide that thoroughly. I asked if he had recognized the name on my badge from work. "That, and I recognized your voice, too."

Ok, I'm officially weirded out for this week. :-)

Do expand.

*sigh* Not much to expand. I'm doing tech support at a local call center for the OpenTable restaurant reservation system. I love the work, but I feel like I'm only getting paid about half what my time is worth. It wasn't quite as bad when Donna was working regularly as a sub at the daycare, but summer vacation season is over now, and things are starting to get... umm... interesting. :-(

[EricG1793]

I've had two online-to-life acquaintances. First, we frequented a school bus forum and I looked at pictures he'd posted of his bus a while back and realized that I saw that bus every afternoon when I watched the buses -- he was only a yell or flailing of arms away, perhaps 20 feet. I sent him a message asking him a question with some very vague details to not give my location away if it wasn't actually him, but it was. We coexisted in reality and virtually for a few years before I made the connection.

In summer 2011, he invited another "bus nut" down to stay with him for a week to work on his school bus to RV conversion, which I helped with a few evenings. This other bus nut is my closest e-buddy. Then we all went to a school bus auction together... not to buy, just to look and mess around and socialize. That was my first time, they had been to several. It was a blast... definitely in the top few best days of my life.

Meeting them wasn't as awkward as I thought it'd be, just the first half hour or so trying to wipe out the image and dimeanor I'd built in my imagination and getting used to reality. Kind of like a close friend telling you about someone that they eventually introduced to you. You meet the person knowing quite a bit about them, so you skip formalities/typical ice breakers and start talking about whatever.

I know the pain with feeling under-rewarded at work. I work in the IT dept at the high school I graduated from in 2012, and I do a little bit of everything, from basic Helpdesk (showing people how to do things) to repairing/setting up computers, printers, copiers, projectors, audio equipment, etc. to assisting the network admin with making changes and troubleshooting problems and filling our purchase orders for things we need to buy. Also reimaging entire computer labs.... We had to reimage every computer in every computer lab Columbus Day weekend due to new servers, and in helping people adjust, making changes, fixing problems that may or may not be a result of the change, etc. have made for some very long nights, sometimes 8 or 10pm. I get to work at 12:30 4 days a week after my 4 college classes from 9-12. Working 25-42 hours for the last several weeks. Put in a 40 hour week in 4 days once. Plus homework. Not fun.... I finally decided to take the week off, now that most everything has been switched over and things are on the way to equilibrium. It isn't devastating to miss a few days at $9/hr, especially when I've been sick, tense, lazy, antisocial, etc. from all the stress. As hard as I do work and as much responsibility as I put on myself, I don't need to be so overwhelmed. I do love the job, but this year has been crazy. I'll love it again after a break.

[Tuttle]

Having a job at least is good Garrett, hopefully you get something that pays better.

I sort of have a job. Kind of. It depends on how you define "job". I'm doing stuff and getting paid for it. I'll actually be going there after I finish this post probably. Though I need to actually pack my bag up and get changed and such.

I'm teaching a high school senior calculus. Her school doesn't offer calculus, and she wanted to learn it, so she talked to her school and for her math credit she's not taking any class with her school and is instead working with me. So, I see her three times a week, and work on calculus. We're currently working on the beginnings of derivatives. And then I get paid for it.

So, 3 days a week I have that, and 1 day a week I'm volunteering at the school still. (Those days overlap, because her school is a mile from the school I volunteer at). Working up in my tutoring. Seeing where I can get with this. Tutoring can make a decent amount of money eventually.

Number of people I've met from the internet:
-one family (5 people)
-one person at said family's house (second time seeing that family)
-one person who drove us to said family's house (second time seeing that family)
-one person who went to the same college I did after knowing him online
-one person who bought me something before we ever met in person, and then we had lunch at google when we met him and he gave it to me
(I can blame PM for all of those people, tripley so the first 7)
-And one person who my boyfriend knew IRL (not met up with her for over a decade, but knew her that long sort of knowing her), but I didn't, and we were members of the same forum and my boyfriend introduced us online and we knew each other online for quite a while before we ever met in person. (How I interact with her is particularly interesting, because we're on multiple of the same forums, we live in the same state, we visit each other when we can, but both sides struggle with transportation (neither her nor I will ever be capable of driving and my boyfriend hasn't had time to learn), so its sorta this online-real-life-thing. So, how she counts is really odd. But I knew her online first. But also, she's not an acquaintance now, she's my closest friend, and its hilarious when we get together because we are so similar in many ways.)

So, 9 people or 10 people depending on if you count the last one.

Garrett - I find the having your brain broken like that kind of awesome.

My real life and online is in this getting more and more intertwined state. I need to figure out what level I want it to be intertwined, and get it stuck there. I've been debating starting up a private screenname for stuff I actually want private, because this name is so much me. Last friday someone asked me my name and I had to stop and think about what my name was because the only thing that came to mind was telling them "Tuttle". (I do have the variants of my screenname but they all link to me strongly still).

But, that's not why its getting intertwined. It's getting intertwined because I'm doing autism advocacy and teaching about autism. It's going to be getting a lot more intertwined next year probably.

On that note! Something I wrote is getting published in a book. The project keeps having deadlines extended, but its seeming to go together from the little bits I've been seeing as a contributor. I like being a contributor. I like teaching people about how I live and stuff. I need to actually get her the last little bits of my stuff, like a picture of me, because she wants pictures of all the contributors, but that's been hard to get. Bleh. Silly pictures.

But I think that's really cool though. I'm really proud of that. It's some of my best writing of a specific style I do I think. It's not my only style, but a style that I think is best for the specific ideas I work with in the writing.

[Lazy Leopard]

I'm enjoying the calm warm weather in Kenya, but I gather plenty of folk are dealing with rather less pleasant weather; floods and storms in the UK, ice storms and the like over in parts of North America, and so on...

Stay safe and enjoy the holiday season wherever you are, and all the best for the new year.

[Caitlin]

Because this is the TOGR, it seems appropriate to just pick up the year-old conversation, yes?

I've had friends heading in both directions.

My first two online-to-IRL meets were out of this forum, most notably Birdhead, who I met when I studied abroad in NZ six or so years ago and then shamelessly took over her couch several times when I went back about two years ago. And I get to see her again this year! So exciting! She's probably one of my oldest friends by this point (it's been more than ten years since we 'met' in these forums, sweet zombie jesus).

I kind of dived out of fandom while I was in college/grad school part one. I came careening back in a few years ago and I've met a lot of those people since then. Maybe it's a thing as you get older in fandom, maybe it's a thing that you don't just know each other wherever you met (these days it's twitter/instagram/tumblr/etc as well) so you get a better idea of everyone else's lives, maybe it's just being out on your own, but I find myself visiting/crashing with internet friends with alarming regularity now. I even travel specifically to visit people I've only known on the internet for just a year or so. I'm going with the super-connectivity.

What's more interesting to me are the IRL people who become internet friends. A girl I went to college with refers to me as her internet friend, although we were good friends in college. That confuses me. I'm really enjoying becoming better friends with people I didn't know well IRL. There are a handful of people who have made that transition- they may as well be internet friends for all the interaction we had when we existed near each other in person. It's an interesting concept, anyway.

Do you guys have anybody who's made the IRL-to-online transition?

[Lazy Leopard]

So, I'm outside the filk room at LonCon 3 this evening, waiting for the evening's circle to start, and who should turn up, but Trialia (who's not been round these parts in ages). She was wearing a DiscworldCon t-shirt, though, so she's obviously hitting the Cons hard this summer; two Cons on successive weekends must be quite tiring...

[Kathy Li]

Wanna help?

Many of you probably already know all about this, but figured if you didn't, it would be fun to mention. There is a website called Zooniverse.

http://www.zooniverse.org

On it, there are a lot of scientists/researchers who need help analyzing something. And the analysis is of the level where an untrained person can help. These are folks with very large data sets, who don't have the manpower to go through all of the data or digitize it, so they're asking for volunteers. Wanna help classify galaxies? Or analyze whale song?

Wanna explore Mars? Mess with sunspots?

Here's one way you can do it. Heard about this on the now-defunct BBC Material World radio show, and thought to myself--I know just the place where there are a couple folks who might be interested in this...

[eowyngirl]

Many of you probably already know all about this, but figured if you didn't, it would be fun to mention. There is a website called Zooniverse.

http://www.zooniverse.org

On it, there are a lot of scientists/researchers who need help analyzing something. And the analysis is of the level where an untrained person can help. These are folks with very large data sets, who don't have the manpower to go through all of the data or digitize it, so they're asking for volunteers. Wanna help classify galaxies? Or analyze whale song?

Wanna explore Mars? Mess with sunspots?

Here's one way you can do it. Heard about this on the now-defunct BBC Material World radio show, and thought to myself--I know just the place where there are a couple folks who might be interested in this...

That is so cool! If only I wasn't already going to be compiling data sets for two different quantitative research projects this semester...ah well, I'll add it as a bookmark. (Also, I'm back from my five-year disappearance/hiatus! Yay!)

[Garrett Fitzgerald]

Many of you probably already know all about this, but figured if you didn't, it would be fun to mention. There is a website called Zooniverse.

http://www.zooniverse.org

On it, there are a lot of scientists/researchers who need help analyzing something. And the analysis is of the level where an untrained person can help. These are folks with very large data sets, who don't have the manpower to go through all of the data or digitize it, so they're asking for volunteers. Wanna help classify galaxies? Or analyze whale song?

Wanna explore Mars? Mess with sunspots?

Here's one way you can do it. Heard about this on the now-defunct BBC Material World radio show, and thought to myself--I know just the place where there are a couple folks who might be interested in this...

And if you're of a more literary bent, there's always Project Gutenberg Distributed Proofreaders. :-)

http://www.pgdp.net

[Lazy Leopard]

*sigh* This evening the Net has been full of the news of Leonard Nimoy's passing.

I didn't get to watch much TV as a kid, but Star Trek was one of my favourite programmes.

I like Ursula Vernon's tribute tweet: "Sigh. Hard to overstate Nimoy's influence. At the age when kids want to be a princess or a firefighter, I wanted to be a Vulcan."

...and the last couple of tweets on his own account are worth pointing out, too. There's a poem posted on February 22nd which ends with the lines:

The miracle is this
The more we share...
The more
We have

...and his final tweet reads "A life is like a garden. Perfect moments can be had, but not preserved, except in memory. LLAP"

[Lazy Leopard]

*sigh* ...and now PTerry's left us, too.

He was one of those authors PeterM pointed me at oh so many years ago.

[Kathy Li]

*sigh* ...and now PTerry's left us, too. ...

I think the thing about his leaving us that I loved was that he had written those tweets for us ahead of time.

I also think I'm happier that he didn't need assistance.

We're all gonna miss him, for certain. If you didn't see it, the video of Neil Gaiman and Michael Chabon's talk the day after it happened, you may want to.

I'm extraordinarily happy I got to meet PTerry once at a signing.

[Tuttle]

I'm really glad we're getting another Tiffany Aching book. It's like "okay, you don't really need to admit this yet".

And really agree that everyone should listen to that. I've made my boyfriend listen already, and he agreed it was absolutely worth listening to.

(And yes, that he'd planned out those tweets was appropriate, and fit very well with how he approached death with all of what he was saying with his Alzheimer's stuff.)

The day after his death, I wore my Discworld sweatshirt to school. It was a really big deal to me that I did so, because what I'd been told to wear to school for dress code didn't include that. I knew they'd be fine with it, but it didn't follow the rules. I spent HOURS agonizing over the fact that I needed to do things like that, but it required breaking rules and I wasn't okay with it. Honoring him won.

I did however get to introduce multiple students to Discworld over the next few days at least.

Currently, I'm going through the process of making sure I get all of discworld onto my kindle (Brutha! Dr Worblehat retired and now I have Brutha my new Voyage) and rereading it all in order.

I'm very sad I didn't ever get to meet him at a signing.

[Kathy Li]

I am depressed today. I am not going to get parking for Comic-Con this year at the convention center. This isn't a tragedy or anything, and is most definitely a first-world problem , but it depresses me none the less because it means I have no local base of operations while at the con to a) shove shopping into or store my food/drink in a cooler--I shall have to carry everything I bring with me around for the entire day and it will take me an additional 90 minutes get to/from the convention each day.

However, I am saved from being too sad by the fact that on StackExchange, I ran into this particular goofy game on the codegolf SE site. (I had to look up codegolf, but it's essentially trying to code something in the fewest characters/bytes possible). Which, in turn, led me to make the glorious discovery of the LOLCODE esoteric language. (There is, btw, an entire website dedicated to esoteric computer languages, should you wish to write code that looks like recipes or code that looks like a Shakespeare play or two-dimensional code).

But, the thing that's cheered me up the most, really, is learning of the existence of LOLCODE.

This is your classic "Hello World" in LOLCODE:

HAI 1.2
  CAN HAS STDIO?
  VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!!!1!"
KTHXBYE

And this is the 99 bottles of beer code in LOLCODE:

BTW LOLCODE version of 99 Bottles of beer
BTW By Mike Gogulski (http://www.gogulski.com/) 13 July 2007
BTW LOLCODE is a programming language by and for lolcats
BTW http://www.lolcode.com/
BTW
BTW Tested with:
BTW   sjlol version 1.1 for lolcode 1.0
BTW     Win32 binary: http://www.rit.edu/~sjl7678/sjlol.zip
BTW     Home: http://lolcode.com/implementations/sjlol 
BTW     Online interpreter: http://wealhtheow.rh.rit.edu:8080/index
BTW       (Doesn't work with comments, so delete all "BTW" lines)
BTW
BTW Save as 99BOTTLZ.LOL, start with "sjlol 99bottlz.lol"
BTW
BTW LOLCATZ CNT SPEL 2 GUD
BTW
HAI
    VISIBLE "O HAI! IM IN UR BEERZ!"
    I HAS A VAR
    LOL VAR R 99
    IM IN YR LOOP
        VISIBLE VAR!
        VISIBLE " BOTTLZ OF BEER N TEH WALL, "!
        VISIBLE VAR!
        VISIBLE " BOTTLZ OF BEER!"
        VISIBLE "TAKE 1 DWN, PAS IT AROUN, "!
        NERFZ VAR!!
        IZ VAR LIEK 0?
            YA RLY
                VISIBLE "NO MOAR"!
            NO WAI
                VISIBLE VAR!
        KTHX
        VISIBLE " BOTTLZ OF BEER N TEH WALL!"
        IZ VAR LIEK 0?
            GTFO
        KTHX
    KTHX
    VISIBLE "GIEV MOAR PLZ! KTHXBAI!"
KTHXBYE

I think it's when I hit the GTFO for "exit" that I really lost it, but they had me from the first BTW.

[Rysade]

I didn't know you were a programmer, Kathy!