Archive for June 2002
murphy squared
Well, I spent the whole of yesterday talking, and barely got through it. My voice box was going through some strange spasms by the end of the day. What frightens me is how much I said – far more than was required to get through the training material. I was telling little stories to keep people awake, and even told the students about the origin of Murphy’s Law during a talk on troubleshooting.
Of course, Murphy’s Law being what it is, I got some of the details wrong – I thought it was 1947, not 1949, and I called him “Dr. Murphy of NASA”, when his title was Captain Murphy of the USAF. I thought the tests were to do with acceleration, not deceleration, but I don’t see a problem there, since they’re the same thing, in different directions. 
trainering
My career as a trainer starts this morning, kind of. In this department, we’re all expected to give training in some form or other, and I’m taking the more formal route, by giving an organized course with a bunch of students who are actually getting time off for that. The alternative is “mentoring”, which I’ll also be doing some of – a couple of hours on a simpler topic with whoever is available.
Still no laptop – no doubt it’ll arrive while I’m away training, so I’m asking the people around me to lock it up if it arrives…
lap lot
Just placed the order for the laptop – no point in waiting, the price was right and it’s not going to come down, if the other PCs in our Employee Purchase scheme are any guide. It should be here in a few days. To think that a few years ago I was planning to bankrupt myself on a PII-300 with a whopping 128MB RAM…
lap link
Quick link for my own reference: Compaq Presario 2815EA. This is the laptop I’m probably going to buy soon – my old IBM Thinkpad 560 (P-133) was never good for much more than writing anyway.
waiting rooms
The trip back was pretty uneventful – a lot of sitting around on buses, then sitting in waiting rooms. The ferry was interesting in itself – the Stena HSS is (they say) the largest fast ferry in the world. Food was bloody awful, though…
sunday doorstop
Sunday 2 June 2002, 10:00
Well, I’m about to get on the bus for a 9-hour trip back to Dublin. It’s a good thing I have work to do, especially my engineering course assignment. I don’t have all the books with me, so I’m not sure how far I can get. This course makes me feel like Homer Simpson sometimes – “every time I learn new stuff, it pushes some old stuff out!”
Yesterday I found a copy of American Scream by Cynthia True, the biography of the late Bill Hicks, with the intention of reading some of it on the bus. American Scream is gripping stuff – a portrait of a young man whose mind was so open that all sorts of crap fell in, then he spent the rest of his life puking it back up on stage. This is someone who spent his early years totally against drugs, alcohol, tobacco and fast food, then did a complete 180 and went over the top, especially with the mushrooms. Oh, those mushrooms.
The book is something of a whitewash, portraying Hicks’ drug experimentation as harmless and glossing over his love of pornography, but the book has enough detail to give one a vicarious “schadenfreude” thrill – “there, but for the grace of {insert deity here}, go I”. I finished it last night, so I’m back to my work and Richard Dawkins’ Unweaving the Rainbow, which I think I’ve read before, for the trip. Well, there’s always the “Sunday Doorstop” if I get bored. Back to work tomorrow, so if my recent entries need cleaning up, they’ll have to wait until then…
