Life as an Extreme Sport

Category: …and everything else

Mostly everything else in a brain-academic way.

Following Up, with Horns

...and everything else

I’ve written a follow-up to my original thoughts on the Edwardses continuing their campaign in light of Elizabeth’s metastatic cancer for the Medical Humanities blog. I typically don’t fill this blog with references to the other blog posts I make – this blog would become less content and more external linking that way, but I particularly liked this off-the-cuff essay, and suspect some of my more regular readers (especially those familiar with my writing at The Daily) will enjoy it, as well.

one common refrain

...and everything else, Academics

Aaah, Google. Every year, you remind me why, if I were to ever leave academia, I would run as fast as I could to your hallowed doors. This year’s 1 April joke is another example of the fabulously twisted humour running through the hacker-run domains of the computer industry. The San Jose Mercury News has a good roundup of recent jokes at Google, and they’re so familiar they ache.

I think the best joke I was ever involved in was probably pulled when I was at Microsoft, and we did similar to the Mercury News mentioned sand in an office. When I was at Microsoft, the Core Networking group was in a newer building with cubiffices – cubicle material, but the walls stretch to the ceiling, forming an office. The nice thing about these, at least from a practical joke point of view, is that they were very easy to break into – just get a ladder, punch your way up through the ceiling (typical office drop down ceiling tiles), and drop yourself gently onto the desk – you were good to go.

Of course, in our case, we didn’t actually want in. We just wanted to get the straw in. For long and ultimately irrelevant and long-gone reasons, we filled the assistant director’s office with straw. A lot of straw. So much straw, I’m not actually sure he could open his door. I’m pretty certain, in fact, we closed the blind to his hall window and then stood there in our own offices, discreetly laughing, as he tried to open his door, finally clued in that we’d had some fun while he was on vacation, and reluctantly went to get the ladder to see just what we’d done. Someone had rigged a webcam on the top of the straw, so when he lifted up the ceiling tile, we could all watch exactly what his expression was – and it was, indeed, priceless. And made the two days of work it took to get the straw out of his office more than worth it.

Of course, I can’t tell a Microsoft story without telling an Apple one (must balance out allegiances); many moons ago (very much dating my time at the company), a bunch of us snuck out from Building 2 and 3, over to Building 6, where we promptly stole every Newton we could get our hands on, replacing them all with etch’n’sketches and notes that “these might be less buggy.”

Aah, good times.

The…staidness of academia is probably one of the things that has been most difficult for me to adjust to. I have a rather well-defined sense of humour, and for years I worked in environments that looked more like overgrown toy stores than offices. I come from a long tradition of office nerf wars, water gun fights, and team built spud guns. The shift from that to the hallowed halls has been interesting, and I often have to reel in my impulse for mischief. And it really hasn’t helped that one of my immediate responses to encountering that sort of staidness is to do something, anything that would counter the mood.

Control wasn’t so hard at the University of Washington, in large part because CHID was a bit more software-industry than most departments, and I worked in the UW computer labs as a sysadmin, where many of the people I worked with shared the hacker humour vibe, and we could send each other stupid, geeky email and play pranks with ease. It was a good escape valve. Here, I’m noticing that sans that escape, I’m a touch pent up and a bit more mischievous than is perhaps wise. Hence my serious consideration of going back into improv comedy. I’ve not been able to join up with the class I’d like to take, due to my travel schedule, but when that calms down I’ll likely find myself on the stage again…for the release, if nothing else. If I’m going to open my mouth to find God speaking, I’d rather it be on a stage than in a classroom.

Still, if you occasionally see the corners of my mouth drift up at inappropriate moments, or catch a far-away gaze in my eyes when I should be focusing on whomever’s lecturing, chances are good I’m just containing impulse and dreaming of running away – not to the circus, but the computer.

gather ’round ye olde camp fire

...and everything else, Academics, AMBI, Bioethics

Alright, kids. We need to sit down and have a chat, and rather right quick, apparently.

First, hi! Wow. Rather suddenly there are quite a lot of you reading this, eh? Mostly silent, but you’ve still got a way of making your impact. I especially like the links and trackbacks and such, thanks.

But see, here’s the thing. Y’all are sort of this vague and amorphous mass, and well, we don’t know each other. (At least, the last time I looked, I didn’t know any amorphous masses. There might be one in my fridge by now, I did forget to clean it out before I left.) Maybe more importantly, you don’t know me – not even those of you I talk with in other mediums. (Consider the fact that the vast majority of the people I talk to on a frequent basis, I have known less than a year.) That can make things kind of weird, because you attach more emphasis on things that are just casual toss-off’s on my part, and probably don’t know what to look for in things that are actually serious.

My dear friend Michael summed it up quite well when I was laughing to him about this earlier tonight.

That’s the problem with blogs. They’re so public and wide audienced that people assume anything posted in them is of critical import, when the purpose of them has simply been to chronicle life, something everyone knows about their own blog but never remember when reading others’.

This, of course, doesn’t mean we can’t and won’t get to know one another… it just means that maybe y’all need to take a couple deep breaths and not worry so much when I post about having emotions.

This post, this one right here, is my 721st post on this blog – I’ve been doing this for a while now, probably longer than most of you, and over the years, a lot of emotion has been captured. This is a chronicle of life. My life. My misadventures, as it was so aptly and recently named. For the last couple of years, that focus has been on academia and my journey through it. But I’ve made the conscious choice that I’m not going to hide in that ivory tower. I don’t want to be your stereotype of an academic, detached from the world and busy with abstracts. Let’s face it – academics, especially those who can put PhD after their name, don’t have the best reputation for being down to earth, or in touch with anything other than their work. Forgive me if I’m trying to avoid that.

Yes, I write about life in all its adventures, mis or otherwise. Sometimes it’s about school, sometimes about my family, cancer, life – even work. But give me some credit, people. I’ve been doing this for a long time, and everything you read is quite carefully filtered. I’m not going to say things that I wouldn’t feel comfortable saying to anyone over coffee and a danish. I’m not going to violate confidences, I’m not going to say something and regret it later – half the time, you read something hours, if not days, after I’ve written it.

I have a silver cuff bracelet. I wear it every day, for reasons I’ll explain some other time. On the front, facing me, stamped in quirky lettering, it says “breathe”. A reminder, to myself, to stop when stress overwhelms me, to pause even when life is good, and center, be. Breathe.

It’s good advice. I heartily recommend you adopt it, especially as it seems to be needed. Just breathe, people. Just breathe.

Hurricane? What hurricane?

...and everything else, Politics

Google demonstrates just how reliable their Google Maps service is: they’ve replaced satellite imagery of New Orleans with pre-Katrina documentation, effectively erasing (and hiding) all the damage done in New Orleans and the surrounding Gulf Coast area.

Google’s response, when questioned by a Senate subcommittee? It seems to boil down to scratching their heads and saying “woops”.

outed

...and everything else, AMBI, Bioethics

I’ve been outed, the rumours are true, I write for more than just you,… whoa, apparently Joss Whedon invaded my thoughts, as I was about to bust out in some Once More, With Feeling-style lyrical shenanigans.

But yes, for those of you reading the editors blog of the American Journal of Bioethics, that would indeed be me that the lead editor just introduced. For those keeping track, that means I write here, there, at the Women’s Bioethics Blog, and the Medical Humanities blog. That’s a lot of blogging.

In actuality, though, I find it pretty easy to figure out what goes where – I just start writing, and the content directs me with where to post. The closest overlap tends to come on issues for the Women’s Bioethics Blog and the AJOBlog, and in that case, the tone (or “voice” for those of you plagued by a theory-heavy humanities background like myself) tends to tell me where to go.

…does this make me a blogaddict?