Got some bad news earlier today. A very nice lady who I’ve known for three years died of a stroke this weekend. I had gotten to know her through Bill Fredlund’s The Making of the Western Mind classes. She was a vivacious, intelligent, and very fit middle-aged woman — and now all of a sudden she’s gone.

I was all set to write a fluffy little entry this evening about my recent experiences setting up a wireless network in my apartment. But now my heart’s not in it. Maybe in a couple of days.

Getting over a cold. It’s an extremely minor cold, but a cold nonetheless.
The lousy thing is that just last week, I was bragging to my sister, my
brother-in-law, and my parents about how I hadn’t gotten sick in over two
years, blah blah blah. Pride goeth before the fall.

At least Pat and
Walkingstick
were kind enough to stop by last weekend and see me in my dire condition:

(phone rings at 10pm)
Me: Hello?
Pat: Hey, it’s Pat. Me and Walkingstick want to come over.
Me: Umm, great! Hey, where are you calling from?
Pat: Sam’s house. We stopped by, but he’s not home.
Me: So what am I, Plan B?
Pat: Don’t flatter yourself.

So the two of them stopped by to hang out for a few hours. Not only did
they leave plenty of cans and bottles behind, but they were cans of
Diet Pepsi and bottles of O’Douls. I mean, cripes, they trash
the place and they don’t even have the decency to bring
real beer. I think I must have the worst friends
ever.¹

Anyway, I’m fighting off this cold with clean living and an all-orange juice diet.
I think it must be working, because last night at poker I actually won a dollar. I
think that constitutes clear evidence that my clarity of mind and body is
improving. However, M’ris suspects that my poker buddies were
just afraid to take my germy money. Shows how much she
knows — I could soak my wallet in untreated Ebola-infected monkey blood and
my poker buddies would still be falling over themselves
to take my money. But really, that’s a whole ‘nother story.

1. Julius Caesar excepted, of course.

Back from Florida, and Grandpa’s (headstone) unveiling ceremony. Hard to believe it’s been a year since he’s been gone.

The good news was that instead of the incompetent-beyond-belief rabbi we had last time, my little sister the proto-rabbi took the reins. She did an awesome job. I asked her where she had gotten the various elements for the ceremony — the songs and prayers, that sort of thing — and she said that she had simply consulted the “magic rabbi book”. No, not the Torah. Apparently there is a recently-written book of poems and songs and prayers with clearly delineated recommendations for usage in various situations, and every modern rabbi has a copy. Seems kind of like cheating to me. On the other hand, the ceremony my sister put together was short and to the point. So I don’t think anyone can argue that she doesn’t have killer rabbinical instincts.

Anyway, the flight back was uneventful, although I did have to wake up at 1:30am PST to catch it. I even made my weekly poker game that evening. The guys didn’t even know I had been gone. “You were where this morning?” they asked. That’s right — I’ll travel 3000 miles just to play poker. Although to be honest, I dont recommend travelling 3000 miles to play poker to the public in general. Nor do I recommend playing poker on three hours of fitful sleep. (A corollary to this rule: when your opponent is showing for a full house, don’t try to bluff him out when you’re showing for a straight — even if you “know” that he doesn’t have the full house. Because if you’re jetlagged, you can rest assured he does have the full house… if not a four-of-a-kind.)

So I haven’t been shaving on a regular basis recently. This became a problem on my last Poker Night. The guys chided me, “You’re probably getting up at noon too! We warned you about this! I tried to explain that A) I was getting up at 8:30, not noon, and B) that my facial hair indicated that I was actually Evil Evan, from the alternate evil universe (just like Evil Spock). But they weren’t buying it. I was Scruffy Evan, at best. That’s all I rate? Scruffy?? I can’t pull off “evil” even when I try.

And I have to say that it would be helpful to look evil at Poker Night. We have a couple of catchphrases we use to coerce our fellow players into taking actions that they ordinarily wouldn’t. One of our favorite catchphrases is “Satan says”, said quickly and in a low pitch. “Satansaysbet.” “Satansaysraise’em.” Or in a game like 7-27, “Satansaysdraw.” In theory, an evil goatee would make my subliminal messages just that much more effective… but if you can’t pull off an evil goatee in the first place, then what’s the point?

In Other News: I bought Mac OS 10.2 (“Jagwyre”), and I plan to install it today. Now the smart thing to do would be to wipe the hard drive completely, install the OS clean, and load all my applications and data back. But that’s haaard and a lot of wooork. It would be much easier to simply back up the most critical files (in case of disaster) and and try to upgrade straight from 10.1 to 10.2. On a Windows box I would never dream of doing this, ever. But a Mac? It might be robust enough to handle it. Then again, it might not. Maybe the “quick upgrade” method will leave me with an unstable OS. But on the other hand, the “clean install” is more work… all that reinstalling of applications… I dunno…

“Satansaysupgrade.”

Well, alrighty then.

A friend of mine (whose name shall be left out for privacy reasons) has a serious girlfriend. They’re thinking marriage. His significant other writes me to say:

Oh, yeah, XXXXX is also afraid I’ll dump him for you, thus the marriage proposal 🙂

If only I had thought to warn her about this earlier! This kind of thing happens because of me all the time. Maybe I should rent myself out to women with committment-phobic boyfriends… errr, that didn’t come out quite right…

One cool thing about this particular couple is that neither of them is particularly happy with diamonds, and so they’re considering alternative stones. A ruby, maybe. Good for them! I think it’s pretty clear that diamonds are bad news, and I heartily applaud their decision to be a little less traditional. If you can call a 75-year-old cartel-manufactured sales gimmick a “tradition”.

Anyway, I haven’t been posting much recently, nor have I been doing a good job of updating my Making of the Western Mind class notes. It’s amazing: when you have more free time, so much more of it goes to waste. Well, the notes are posted¹, and I’ll be posting more often too.

And finishing the damn tutorial.

And flossing.

1. There’s no direct link to the MOTWM class notes, but if you’re in the 3rd year class, you should have the URL. Or if you need it, you can email me. Or, to be honest, the URL is eminently guessable. You’re smart people.

Karin writes:

To make a long story short, I got bored of studying for the LSAT and after viewing Byron’s latest on storyteller, visited your site. I came upon the journal entry dated Sept. 8, 2002 in which you mention about something about Byron’s raingear and that my role, as his fiancee, is to prevent fashion disasters and all that. Well, as the evidence shows, this is out of my league. I readily admit that I am not woman enough to handle this one. Cute as he may be, he’s on his own when it comes to picking out clothing.

I should state for the record that Karin is currently braving gale-force winds in a rickety wooden Viking ship in the fjords of Norway, so don’t let her attempt to sell herself short fool you. However, even I have to admit that in this instance she has her work cut out for her:

The bad thing about going on a trip, even a short one, is the food. Oy, all the food. Eric and Susan took me out to dinner for every meal for two days straight. Jason and Megan fed me good beer and tried to convince me to move down to LA. (Megan: “You already have a built-in network of friends… and if Sarah goes to Scripps, more than half your family will be down here…”) My Uncle Mitch went in to work very late just so that he could serve homemade omelettes and bagels and fruit. (I think Uncle Mitch was feeling guilty about taking me 1800 feet up in a pre-dawn hike up Camelback Mountain in Phoenix. “You ready for an adventure?” he said, rapping at my door at 4:30am.¹) But the grand prize goes to Derrick, who took the entire day off to hang out and force-feed me home-grilled steaks and bread and cheese and salad and pumpkin pie… for lunch.²

So last Sunday, I drove down to LA with Eric and Susan. I thought we were being clever leaving at 4:30pm — we’d miss most of Thanksgiving traffic. To provide an idea of how brilliant this notion was, it took us over an hour to get from Gilroy to Pacheco Pass, about six miles. Eric said that the drive wasn’t so bad, because he had two people to keep him company in the car. He’s just being polite, though — Susan and I both fell asleep about two hours into the trip.

On Monday I helped Eric move his new furniture out of storage and into his new place in Pasadena or wherever it is (the hell if I know). We got the furniture out without too much trouble³, but the tricky part was getting the furniture into the apartment. We managed to work the couch around the corner of the doorway in the usual manner, but the dinner table wasn’t going to make it. I suggested that we tilt and flip the table over the 5′ patio wall. Eric was a bit dubious, but the idea worked brilliantly, and I was quite proud of myself for coming up with it on the fly. That is until last night at poker, when Jay pointed out that this was the exact same maneuver we used getting his furniture down a tricky staircase. I had completely forgotten about that. “You’re a real mover now,” said Jay. “That trick is buried in your spinal reflexes.”

I also got to see Eric and Susan’s law offices, and met a few of their colleagues. Susan told me later, to my horror, that her female colleagues were asking about me. Suddenly the downside of being “temporarily retired” became crystal clear. “So what does your boyfriend’s friend do?” the attractive young senior associate had asked. Well Susan hemmed and hawed and finally told them that I worked for Sun Microsystems, but she wasn’t sure exactly what I was doing for them.⁴ She also mentioned that I had helped my old mentor edit his Statistical Mechanics textbook, and apparently both of her friends were quite impressed by this. So for all you naysayers who think that studying physics will never get you chicks — HA.

1. The part that makes me feel guilty was that right near the summit, two 70ish ladies passed us on the way up. They were chatting amiably and not even breaking a sweat.

2. As I grow older, I’ve realized that my ideal vacation revolves around talking and eating. By these standards, this particular trip was an unqualified success.

3. No thanks to the inexplicable doorways in the corridors of the storage place, which only serve to narrow the maneuvering area for large, inflexible, scratchable pieces of furniture.

4. Which was technically true — the way the “notification period” works, I was still an employee on that date, strangely enough.

Ordinarily I don’t talk much about work here. (I consider it unprofessional.) However, this particular news is worth a mention — I’ve been laid off at Sun. Or in company parliance, “RIFFed” (RIF = Reduction In Force).

I’m actually feeling pretty good about the whole thing. First, I’m young and resilient. I hate to say it, but I’m glad it was me and not some 48-year-old guy with a mortgage and kids in school.¹ Second, none of this was a big surprise to me — my group got hit hard (as I figured), and they basically just kept core, veteran engineers (as I also figured). Third, the severance package and my savings will tide me over for a reasonable length of time.² Finally, and most importantly, this is a good “kick in the seat” to go do something new and interesting. I think I need such kicks every once in a while — without them, I tend to get stuck in a rut.

Anyway, yesterday really wasn’t so bad. My director (who had to break the news to each of us) seemed like he was having a much worse day than anyone else. I was actually quite cheerful, and all my colleagues came by to chat and wish me good luck, which was nice. Well, okay, there was one low point. I was joking around with two longtime engineers, Carlos and Benoit, when a cute young systems engineer poked her head in my office. (She was attached to Benoit’s project, I think.) After a few minutes of banter, the conversation went like this:³

Cute Young SE: Wow, I’ve never seen such a neat, clean office.

Benoit: That’s our webmaster! He’s very neat and organized.⁴ Someday he’s going to make a great husband for someone.

Carlos: Husband?? No, he’s not ready to go out and get married… he should just go out and have fun!

Benoit: No, it’s time for him to find a nice girl and settle down.

[they argue]

Cute Young SE (noticing me rolling my eyes): C’mon, guys. You can’t just assume he’s interested in girls…

[Carlos and Benoit stop arguing. Cute Young SE turns bright red.]

Me: Well, I think we’ve now hit the high point of my day.

It’s hard enough to ask a cute girl out when you’re an unemployed loser, but when you’re an unemployed possibly gay loser, it’s pretty much a no-go.

1. Not that I think 48-year-olds with mortgages have more right to keep their job than a young punk such as myself. That line of thinking leads directly to the 1950s office (back when they paid unmarried men less than married men). It’s just that… I feel better about it being me rather than them, that’s all.

2. That is, if I can keep my insanely expensive appetites in check. No more Prada underwear, damnit.

3. Paraphrasing, of course.

4. Friends and family will guffaw at this. But actually my office was usually quite neat and organized, mostly because I didn’t keep a lot of stuff in it.

So M’ris, Mark, Tim, and Amber came over tonight for dinner. We had salad. We had lefse. We had chocolate pots de creme. And we had broiled flank steak. Well… we almost had broiled flank steak. The steak was about halfway done when I heard a couple of sharp pops, accompanied by bright flashes of light coming from behind the oven. “Ummm… that didn’t sound good,” said my guests. “No, it didn’t,” I said, as I watched white wisps of smoke wafting up from behind the oven.

After waiting a bit to make sure that the apartment wasn’t going to catch on fire, it seemed best to go to La Bodeguita del Medio and get some Cuban food and mojitos (“Mojito”: Spanish for “a drink that makes everything all better”). So all in all it was a successful evening. I returned Diamond Age to M’ris, and lent her the Sandman series. In turn, M’ris and Tim gave me some David Brin reading recommendations. I had read Earth many years ago, but Tim assures me that the Uplift War series is much better. Speaking of Brin, he also has a very interesting essay on his site, “The Case for a Cheerful Libertarianism“. It’s really quite good. Almost enough to make one become a libertarian, if one were just a little more inclined that way. Actually, Brin’s brand of cheerful pragmatism has a lot going for it in general. Very few people like humorless ideologues, no matter what their political persuasion. And nobody likes to be called stupid or evil. One wonders why calling one’s opponents stupid or evil is such a popular debating tactic. But then, of course, one is forced to take a look at one’s own writings, and one begins to feel depressed. One thinks it best to call it a night.

Yesterday Pat sent the following short email to all his friends:

To Whom It May Concern:

As of close of business Friday Sony has decided to hire BOTH of the Becker
Brothers©, a move that has been disastrous for previous employers big or
small.  Their stock closed at $42.25 today, only time will tell if the
Becker Brothers© can continue to bring their own special brand of economic
karma to the corporations of America.  

Patrick Becker

For the last couple of months, Pat had been thoughtfully keeping himself out of the job market. But now that both he and his brother work for the same company… well, I think we can all kiss Sony goodbye. Think I’m crazy? Take a look at the evidence for yourself. Pat, Sam, haven’t the Japanese people suffered enough economic pain this decade? Have you no shame? Won’t somebody think of the children?