Category: Life

Pertaining to, or having as its primary inspiration, the life and times of one Johnathan Eric Nightingale.

Mathematiques Roadshow

Antique Drawer knobI don’t think it’s very normal of me, at the tender young age of 28, to enjoy the Antiques Roadshow as much as I do. I tend to explain that I like it for very much the same reasons that I like books like Salt; namely, that in the examination of the most arbitrary of things, you can reveal the history of the whole damned world. Me being me, of course, a not-insignificant contribution to my enjoyment is made by the people-watching aspect of it.  People are shy or proud or hopeful or confused about the things they bring in, but they are always invested, and that gives the show some (albeit subtle) dramatic tension that predates reality TV.

There is an undercurrent of innumeracy in the show, though, that I find distracting. In the end it’s not enough to wean me – if people are happy in their numerical misunderstanding, so be it; I would hope never to be the one subtracting happiness from the world. But it creates a sort of dissonance for me when I’m watching, to know that their notions of appreciation, even the appraisers and experts, is sort of… out of whack.

Continue reading “Mathematiques Roadshow” →

Corporate Wildlife

American GoldfinchThe IBM Toronto Lab is a bit of a misnomer. Shortly after I joined we moved out of Toronto, up to Markham, to a brand new lab on a relatively large chunk of property (our ribbon cutting ceremony was September 11, 2001). The nice thing is that this relatively large property is also basically undeveloped except where the buildings and parking lots stand, leaving a fair bit of genuine certified nature lying about. I’ve been keeping a bit of a list, and so far in 2006 I’ve seen (in addition to plants and insects):

  • Deer x 1
  • Rabbits x 2.5 (2 adults, 1 baby)
  • Racoons x 2
  • Squirrels x N

Not a particularly formidable list, though the doe in particular was quite captivating, and quite close. But then there’s the birds…

Continue reading “Corporate Wildlife” →

God Bless The Internet

King of the World

The internet never forgets. It’s like a giant fiberoptic elephant in an infinite temporal archive made of peanut butter. This can be a bummer if you’re Sanford Wallace or Bernard Shifman but on balance the creation of a broadly democratized, high availability, modern day Library of Alexandria is probably worth a little embarassment. And it never forgets.

It never forgets, for instance, that I have a couple of websites older than this fine, upstanding blog. And I haven’t even linked to the really old ones findable only in archive.org. Silly websites, serious websites, why, even The Coming Revolution is still up, in all it’s crusty glory. For your reference:


[root@lubis html]# ls -l revolution.html
-rw-r--r-- 1 nobody nobody 17445 Jun 23 2002 revolution.html
[root@lubis html]#

4 years crusty. But this is the internet. So it is with less surprise than you might imagine, that I occasionally receive email about this, or other pages. This one came in earlier today:

Continue reading “God Bless The Internet” →

Signs of Life

It is customary to begin posts of this ilk with a quasi-humourous apology & disclaimer, but you, my readership, are all far too busy to dwell on the reasons for my 47-day absence. Nevertheless, if only to slake your curiousity, please feel invited to select from the following:

  1. When people decide to have you redesign a product with a 6-figure license, per cpu, you find yourself suddenly rather busy.
  2. When starting a different blog, however domain-specific,
    you find yourself suddenly out of things to post.
  3. When, simultaneously, you start a couple writing projects at work, you tend to find your writing jones otherwise occupied, and lose the ability to write words good.

I work too much, I’m a drunk, and I’m cheating on you at the office.

But I swear baby, it’ll be different this time.

Taskbar Navel Gazing

In Cryptonomicon, Waterhouse beats himself up at one point (I think most people will not remember this part, but it stuck with me for whatever reason) for not being capable enough to decode the waves. The movements of German troops must, so the argument goes, have some seismic influence on the patterns of the waves in the ocean which we ought therefore to be able to decode at the receiving end. Our poor finite brains though, being poor and finite as they are, simply can’t cope with all the interfering variables and hence that information is lost to us. This is an observation that can keep me up nights when I think too much about it, but most of the time I’m content with the watered down version, which is that sometimes a seemingly trivial piece of information can allow a person of suitable constitution to extract deep and elaborate detail.

What with my previous post being a relatively low-res look at how my life has changed at work, I thought another might be in order because what is a blog, really, if not an uninteresting pile of introspective garbage? Behold, my taskbar:
Continue reading “Taskbar Navel Gazing” →

Fun with Excel Charts

Well, just one chart really.

So we recently upgraded to Lotus Notes 7 internally (IBM, owning Lotus, sort of has to use Notes, so no comments about how much better we’d all be with outlook, or pine, or just throwing rocks with writing on them. Trust me, we know. The rocks would be much more usable, too.) In a doomed effort to discover the improvements in the product that would justify a new version number (job preservation addendum: I’m sure there really are lots of great improvements in all the places I didn’t look) I stumbled on to the (not-new) “all calendar items” view in the calendar. This view lists everything, not just your meetings, but your vacation days, your reminders, and also meta stuff like cancellation notices and room changes and the like. The point being, it’s not necessarily safe to say that if you have 30 entries for July 2005, that you had 30 meetings, but it probably is safe to say that that month was twice as busy as the one with 15 items, at least as far as meetings go.

All of which is great fun to play with in excel, so on with the infoporn:
Continue reading “Fun with Excel Charts” →

RIP Bryan Archer

For those who know the name, but didn’t know the news, Kristine’s dad died last week after complications during heart surgery. Combined with Virve’s dad a couple years ago, I will no doubt look back on this as the point in my life when my friends’ parents started dying. Followed none too distantly by the point in life where my own friends start dying, no doubt. I will avoid reflecting on the experience too much here since there is not likely to be anything new for me to contribute to the human corpus on the subject of dying, but suffice it to say that a) it sucks, and b) it was really quite nice to see some of the people there again, some for the first time in a decade. For those not in the know, Kristine is a friend of ours from high school, and so were many of the folks we bumped into there: Rajit (of course), Jocelyn, Virve, Janice, Miguel. We missed Alex, Paul, Craig, Joydip, Nick and Apeksha, all of whom are either on their way or were there and gone before we arrived. Weddings and Funerals – it’s how we stay connected when all else fails.

Kristine if you read this you know you are in our thoughts.

On Cruising

The fascination the world expresses with my travel plans and outcomes is, of course, an affectation put on solely for my benefit. I understand this. Against the possibility though, however remote, that people are genuinely interested in my experience both generically as a prototypical 20-something first-time-cruiser and specifically as Johnath, writer of long sentences, I will endeavour to be, if not precisely interesting, at least tiresome on new subjects.

The particulars of such things are rarely important but for your reference, our ship was the Legend of the Seas, our cruiseline Royal Caribbean, and our itinerary included Tampa, Grand Cayman, Belize, Costa Maya, and Cozumel. I will try to focus on the experience as a cruise, since I sense that many of my friends (dare I say, readers) have not cruised before. Continue reading “On Cruising” →

Please No Shopping Carts Inside The Restaurant

For those who, according to the BS pop-psych uncalibrated self-tests they had everyone do in 1987, are “visual learners,” or “greens,” or “type IIIs,” or “QNTZs,” or “hippies,” I have finally put something in my flickr account, and provided suitable linkage herefrom. May I present then, without further pomp or ado,

Photos That Please Me – a photoset on Flickr

I believe I was the photographer on every one in which I am not a subject, so hefty derivative cheques come hither. It should be noted that this reexamination of old pictures was greatly facilitated by Picasa2, which you should all go download.