Whose Faulty Vision

Going Away

I’m heading out to California this afternoon, to spend Christmas with my parents (and with Christmas) and then do some skiing up at Lake Tahoe. Yes, I know I’m crazy to be traveling on what will probably be the second-busiest travel day of the year, but there you have it. I’ll have my Treo with me, but I’m still not expecting to blog all that much until I get back at the beginning of January.

Quote of the Whenever

Quote of the Whenever:

“Having a personal philosophy is like having a pet marmoset, because it may be very attractive when you acquire it, but there may be situations when it will not come in handy at all. “He or she who hesitates is lost” sounded like a reasonable philosophy at first glance, but the Baudelaires could think of situations in which hesitating might be the best thing to do. . . . But despite all these incidents in which hesitation had been very helpful, the children did not wish to adopt “He or she who does not hesitate is lost” as their personal philosophy, because a giant octopus might come along at any moment, particular when the Baudelaires were on board a submarine, and the siblings would be very foolish to hesitate if the octopus were coming after them. Perhaps, the Baudelaires thought, the wisest personal philosophy concerning hesitation would be “Sometimes he or she should hesitate and sometimes he or she should not hesitate,” but this seemed far too long and vague to be much use on a plaque.”

-Lemony Snicket

Poem: Picture Puzzle Piece

Picture Puzzle Piece by Shel Silverstein

One picture puzzle piece
Lyin’ on the sidewalk,
One picture puzzle piece
Soakin’ in the rain.
It might be a button of blue
On the coat of the woman
Who lived in a shoe.
It might be a magical bean,
Or a fold in the red
Velvet robe of a queen.
It might be the one little bite
Of the apple her stepmother
Gave to Snow White.
It might be the veil of a bride
Or a bottle with some evil genie inside.
It might be a small tuft of hair
On the big bouncy belly
Of Bobo the Bear.
It might be a bit of the cloak
Of the Witch of the West
As she melted to smoke.
It might be a shadowy trace
Of a tear that runs down an angel’s face.
Nothing has more possibilities
Than one old wet picture puzzle piece.

Superman Physics

In the first Superman movie, in that famous scene where Superman takes Lois Lane out flying, why is she positioned like him, as though she were lying down, instead of dangling downward from his hand? She must have some amazing arm muscles. And back muscles and leg muscles too, for that matter.

Happy E-Mail

So a few weeks back, I was working on a presentation. A co-worker had done a first pass at the slides, but they were pretty bad, so I was going through and doing a pretty major re-write to make them into a presentation that wouldn’t put people to sleep. As I was going through, changing slide titles to something meaningful, making sure all of the statistics were in context, adding interesting implications and so on, I realized that the changes I was making were following a way of designing presentations that a former boss here at the agency had beaten into my skull. She and I had worked on a few decks together, and she was always wanting to re-write my slides in exactly the way that I was now re-writing the other guy’s slides. And of course, in her case and in mine, it was a massive improvement that would make the decks much more interesting.

So I wrote her an e-mail, thanking her for enforcing that discipline in my decks, and saying how much better the deck I was working on had become as a result.

Well, she was really touched. She’s mentioned that e-mail to me on multiple occasions since then, and apparently even sent a copy to her former mentor, to show how the mentoring has moved down the line. It clearly really made her day.

So yeah, happy thing for both of us.

Quote of the Whenever

Quote of the Whenever:

“FAIRY-TALES do not give a child his first idea of bogy. What fairy-tales give the child is his first clear idea of the possible defeat of bogy. The baby has known the dragon intimately ever since he had an imagination. What the fairy-tale provides for him is a St. George to kill the dragon.”

-G. K. Chesterton. I quoted an abridged version of this quote a few years back; this appears to be the full version.

Miss Christmas

Between my trip to Atlanta and her trip up to Ithaca, I haven’t seen Christmas for a week now. I miss her.