stevengharms.com

I’ve been preparing for the GRE since summer, July, actually. Tuesday I take the test. That may explain why writing here has been so sparse.

I’m a bit daunted, I’m doing the drills about where I need to, and yet I still worry. When the 4 hours is up I will see two numbers, thereafter I shall be elated ( whee! ) or, like the proverbial groundhog, shall have to return to my study den.

Here’s the truth: I’m sick and tired of the study den!

So, I spend, what I hope, will be this last Saturday looking at quantitative comparisons.

Anyway, here’s a great interview with the inimitable Paul Volcker:

“It seems to me what our nation needs is more civil engineers and electrical engineers and fewer financial engineers,” Volcker said.

Yes, it’s the day, the real day.

You can see pictures from the party we had for her over the weekend on Flickr.

I can’t wait to give presents! It’s my favorite part of birthdays!

Today WaMu bit the big one and the Republicans, those sacred guardians of fiscal conservatism, personal responsibility, and hard-work, are pushing for Congress to accept another balance of power mutating scheme that will make the few rich and undermine the checks and balances system.

But today, my friends, something momentous has happened in my life. I now owe a big fat $0.00 of credit card debt.

Having good credit has allowed me some really sweet 0% finances for moving, buying furniture, buying a car, selling that car, buying another car, re-financing my current car, buying office machinery needed, going to Rome, taking classes in Rome, going to Vancouver, trips to CA, presents, a TV, and a great fair bit of dining out. But it all came at a price, the sick feeling of moving monetized debt from place to place.

Make no doubt, I payed good attention to the lectures in Finance and have absorbed the lesson that someone else’s credit is better than my liquidity, that a dollar tomorrow is better than a dollar today ( when giving ), and that when you can get cheap capital ( and it isn’t much cheaper than 0% ) you should use the hell out of it. Knowing these lessons allowed me to use the capital well and not get in a screwy situation that a great many consumers are in now.

But the thing is, when you manage debt, it requires a certain amount of mental effort. You’re aware it’s out there. Companies and corporations hire people to make sure that the transactions are performed at the right time, that the narrowest of windows are used to maximize the profit made on other people’s money before they want it back. Monetized debt, the way that our world is run, is something that I just don’t want to carry around anymore.

Henceforth, only mortgages ( no plans looming there ) and car notes ( only one, and the payment’s reasonable, and I’m going to start attacking it now that I’m free of the shackles of Delaware ) are going to be in my portfolio, the rest is staying in currency and investment. It’s a tool, but never again will I finance my lifestyle by means of it.

I’m going to have to put “no” back in my vocabulary, until the Bank of Steven is a bit richer, but worry is an activity I no longer want in my life.

I’ve been taking a bit of a hiatus from blogging thanks to:

1. Car accident drama
2. Latin III
3. postponed GRE from this weekend to the 24^th of October
4. Work
5. The LatinVerb library.

Most of these don’t produce much in the way of visual artifacts, but here’s a short demonstration of the LatinVerb library ( it’s coherently working, but still needs some refactoring to get it to 0.1 release state… ). Here’s the video:

What’s going on here is that I have a Ruby debugger ( RDebug ) session open where I’ve created an instance of Latin::LatinVerb. I then proceed to execute some of the “vectors” that uniquely identify a single conjugation of a verb or a collection of verb tenses.

It’s not too pretty yet, my main work has been on getting the thinking working. The displaying part comes next.

Ants in the pantry = food all over the house and not in the pantry

“Great!”

[ Lauren’s Take ]

“Steven”

By the middle syllable I knew something was very, very wrong. I grabbed my bag and tried to work my way out of the conference ballroom as unnoticed as possible.

“Car accident…everyone OK…”

I drove with single-minded focus south down MoPac and swung onto North Lamar.

“At least everyone was OK…she’s OK, she called me”

I approached the spot and the car looked OK from the right, and then I parked and saw the above.

The fear that had been gnawing at the periphery of my awareness came into full focus.

“The other car was in the boundaries of this car…”

It was incongruous, seeing the thirsty, distracted girl whole and shaken and seeing the bent metal before me. I traced my finger along the shattered glass in the door to feel something real of the trauma.

She had been in an accident, a wreck that hit her square in the door - the weakest part.

Having lived things I can say now, coherently, that Saturday Lauren was involved in an accident on South Lamar. She’s got shoulder and neck pain and had a scratch on her left leg. She’s recovering. It seems so strange to me that she is walking, talking, safe in the other room as I type this, and, right now, I can see a grisly mangled box on wheels.

But she’s safe right now, but she’s safe right now, I repeat.

Today the insurance company called and told us that the car will now go the way of the Charon. Said the adjustor: “They always walk away from Honda’s…she’s really very lucky”.

Farewell, Honda Accord, you have seen the heights of Tahoe, the lows of Pete’s Path and the ways of MoPac. You have picked me up, taken me to school, been to HEB, and ferried us throughout the South Bay. You loved San Francisco and baths at the apartment care care center.

And while I shall miss you as you voyage on, my love remains well and whole thanks to your last, brave, valiant act. Good night, brave sir, may the Shinto gods of the land of your birth greet you as your frame is melted into a liquid-metallic Tao that quickened you.

I loved Ellison’s Invisible Man: a smart black man refuses to be the tool of American hypocrisy or Communist rabble–rousers and instead asks society to engage him in the most difficult way possible: as a man in himself.

Ellison’s writing has a stark, almost journalistic character, but you definitely feel his familiarity with the Southern Gothic’s sentimentalism.

In an absolutely beautiful sample of Ellison’s style I cite:

Materially, psychologically and culturally, part of the nation’s heritage is Negro American, and whatever it becomes will be shaped in part by the Negro’s presence. Which is fortunate, for today it is the black American who puts pressure upon the nation to live up to its ideals. It is he who gives creative tension to our struggle for justice and for the elimination of those factors, social and psychological, which make for slums and shaky suburban communities. It is he who insists that we purify the American language by demanding that there be a closer correlation between the meaning of words and reality, between ideal and conduct, our assertions and our actions. Without the black American, something irrepressibly hopeful and creative would go out of the American spirit, and the nation might well succumb to the moral slobbism that has ever threatened its existence from within.

America Without the Negro

It’s 10:04 as I write this, and I normally wouldn’t say such a thing as this for fear of a jinxing, but for my later-rising friends I feel I should recount that:

…on the way out the door I felt a breeze that was distinctly not reminiscent of Thermopylae

…I smelled the smell of fresh cut grass

…my mind briefly flashed to the Texas v. Tech football game ( traditionally in late October )

I could be wrong, but I believe that I felt the faintest, slimmest, most gossamer hint of the suggestion of the remembrance of the season known as fall.

And sure, today I’m sure we’ll run a tight tangent line to the hundred degree mark, but this morning, soft as a robin’s breast, gentle as a snowflake, tender as Lauren’s right cheek, I felt the idea of fall.

Thinking about my work career, in the area before I got into technology, it looked like this:

1. Randall’s: Stocker (fall 94- spring 95)
2. Randall’s: Deli Guy (summer 1995)
3. Kumon: Grader / Instructor (summer 1996)
4. Informal Classes: (fall 1996-spring 1997)
5. Started an a small IT consultancy…

I would like to talk about my tenure as a Deli Guy, #2, above.

As far as your teenage jobs that make you wear a stupid get-up and use cleaning and bleach nightly, it wasn’t actually too bad. Working in the deli meant that you had basically 3 primary roles:

1. Serve food from the deli ( it had usually been fried up hours before, and even then, dumping chicken out a bag and into a fryer wasn’t too hard )
2. Slice meats and cheeses
3. Serve cookies to little kids

In short, it was a pretty easy gig provided you could handle working with those slicers ( maybe I’ll write about my one-and-only accident with that one on another occasion ).

Now, after a certain hour at night, the bakery was empty which was conjoined with the deli area. So one night, nearing close I was standing there waiting to slice up some pastrami or Boar’s Head black forest ham when a panicked lady came up to me. Now panic is not usually a state associated with buying fine imported meat, so I was a bit on edge.

“I need you to make me a cake”

As a matter of fact, under my nametag it said “MEATOLOGIST” to let the world know that my skills were in the cured meats part of the universe.

“You need a cake,” I asked, hesitantly.

“Yes, and as quickly as possible, and I need it to say ‘Congratulations Billy.’ [ or somesuch ]”.

I was unprepared for the idea that I should have something to do with this sought item.

“Hold on just a moment,” I stated, to her obvious chagrin.

“Manager red-line to the deli,” I summoned out over the PA.
“Hey Steven, what’s going on?”.
“Uh, do we make cakes?”
“Sure there’s a big bakery right next to you, right?”
“No, I mean, do I bake cakes”
“Do you know how?”
“No.”
“Then, no.”
“Well I have a lady asking me for a cake”
“Well then give her one in the cooler”
“But she wants a message iced on it”
“…” “I, uh, don’t know how to ice a cursive-y message on a cake, do you”
“Uh, no. Well, do your best and let me know if there are any issues.”

I have come to realize answers such as this are typical of managers, but I was unprepared for the answer at the time. I think the crestfallen look of my face gave away to the lady what the game was.

“Ma’am,” I started, “I cut meat here. I serve chicken over there,” I gestured leftward.

“I can give you one of those big blank cakes in the cooler and you can have cake. But I have no idea how to put a message on it. But I will try, but I’m not sure how well I can do. If you need a cake that badly, then I will try for you. Is this OK?” I tried to say this with the gravity that a doctor might say to an anxious parent whose child could only be saved by a daring cutting-edge technique.

She solemnly nodded.

I said: “Pick out the cake and I’ll get some icing”.

So I went to the baker’s table. Big waxy paper. Check. Funny thimble thing with a hole in it. Check. I went to the baker’s cooler and found a paint can of BLUE. I asked her if blue was OK. She assented and gave me the big white sheet-cake she had found. I guess she figured by giving me a cake shaped like a large “Hello, My Name Is” tag I might not screw it up too bad.

I fashioned a crude cone out of the wax paper and applied the tip. I believe I also took some scotch tape to make sure the tip stayed on. Given the lack of other backup cakes I didn’t want to ruin my only canvas.

I took a large frosting knife and smeared a dollop in the wax paper. I twisted up the top and the misshapen frosting cone was ready to go. I took a test sheet of wax paper and wrote my name. It came out badly. I pulled another sheet, slowed down and tried again. It looked serviceable.

I went around the table and started. Not having written in cursive for many years I was a bit hesitant but was able to write out that message in that diagonal y=.33x+4 upward line that says “Hey, this cake is fun”.

I looked at my handiwork and then at her. Her eyes were doe-like and seeking. I put down my sugary tube-ball of icing and walked the cake over to her. My eyes met hers and then she looked at the cake. She looked back up and me and said: “Not bad!”.

I gathered the plastic protector and sold her the cake. I turned around to the baking table which had smears of blue everywhere.

I put the tools of the trade away and cleaned up, dousing the table with disinfectant bleach before turning off the lights.

I headed back to my post to count out the remaining few minutes, praying that no one else had a cake emergency.

Thus when today the League posted Cake Wrecks, I immediately felt for those creators.

Well the 7^th marked the 5^th year of my running a site. Isn’t that thrilling? It’s been a chore sometimes, my only tendril to sanity others, and a great place to store ideas, sketches, and things that I’ve discovered along the way.

Better yet are those who I discovered: The League and the missus, other friends, family and passers-by of their way.

Sometimes it’s also been a way to keep my California friends and folks aware of what was going on with me out there in the middle of our continent.

I’ve shared pictures and code and rants and raves. I even urged my girlfriend to get a site which she has designed into an ordered, pristine beauty.

According to WordPress I’ve written 1013 entries. That’s about 200 entries a year. Yikes.

But it also is the season of the marking of my trip around old Sol and it was a really wonderful occasion this year. Lauren surprised me by keeping me in the dark as to what would happen.

Saturday we slept in ( mel-a-to-nin, hell yes ) and I was woken up with Lauren’s fabulous fritatta. It is, how you say, so tasty. Creamed spinach, cream, eggs, mushrooms, and a secret blend of spicy kick makes you say “ow” and “mm” simultaneously. I’m glad Lauren’s tastebuds warmed up to Texas chile-friendly cookin’.

Lauren baked through most of the day but she had arranged for oh so many of my friends to come and meet us at Threadgills that evening. Present were:

The Garcias. Alfredo, who has always had the skill of being a master of costume, stentorian oration, and croquet and his lovely wife made it. While my dancing obligation and their trivia mania keeps us apart, it was great to see them.

Juan G. et Letitia who tolerates my abysmal French. Juan’s iPhone shredded cheese and made the photos that Lauren made into a photomontage ( see below ). Letty is also the only person who wished me « bon anniversaire », and that’s special

Juan D. who is one cool cat. I had recently learned about Juan’s mastery of synthesizers from the lamentably-absent Nicole ( who was in a cave, working out that “Tom Sawyer” solo ). I never have a chance to speak with him as long as I wish because I’m either quickly heading down in a spiral of Crown Royal or there’s just too much going on. We actually did get to talk a bit of e-music and I can certainly imagine him having been a good teacher of synthesizer theory.

I also believe I may have called him “Mr. Garcia” upon the conclusion of the evening. I woke Sunday morning thinking “did I call Juan by the wrong surname?” Juan, if you remember, which I clearly don’t ( Margarita Fail!), and I did the wrong way, sorry about that.

The Melbotises were both there, of course, with a family theme enhanced by the presence of League-brother and legal eagle Steanso.

Making my birthday even more festive was the fact that my friend Trevor’s music career appears to be in a really exciting nascent state. Now, mark you well, he’s been working for a great many years in that luxuriously beautiful study of his where only his iMac and the stillness of 5 ante meridien cup his creative dæmon–but the world seems to be opening up thanks to a recent performance in that city of the avant garde artist, Berlin.

Trevor also took the time to consider my research proposal theses which he basically said were crap ( but in a very nice fashion ) and offered to help me refine other lines of questioning. Academic life is riddled with such challenges in pursuit of truth, so I’m thankful for his feedback and his offer to read future suggestions. I really feel like all my friends are really supportive of my school idea, so thank you. I shall be very sad to tell you all of my non-prospects in but a few months.

And last in the order, but first in the parking lot, was Matt who also started the trend of giving me bottles of red wine. This action was echoed by Jason as well as the Garcias. Thank you all for such gifts. Apparently the red-skinned grape has some kooky molecule in it that makes you live longer, and I like the idea of that, so thanks.

Incidentally, Nicole, there was a cupcake that went home with Matt for you. I’m not saying you’re going to get it, but it was sent.

Also I must thank The League et uxor for their gift of literature. While my reading these a days usually finds punctuation in “(A) is greater, (B) is greater, (C) the quantities are equal, or (D) cannot be determined”, one day I will get back to books that involve sentiments. Although before the festivities I got to read “The Killing Joke” which had been lent to Lauren and I remembered how interesting ( and terribly, terribly gruesome ) it is. DC really had it going on back in that era: Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, and Frank Miller all pushing the craft forward ( Ryan has some great thoughts on how The Dark Knight basically pulled a “Dark Knight Returns” on the superhero movie industry ).

So thank you, thank you all so much for coming out. But in a world where schedules are so variable, and it’s so rare for a birthday to actually fall on a Saturday, I must thank the person who tirelessly herded all the kittens: my friend, my true love, my wonderful girlfriend, Lauren.

I admit, I wasn’t that hot on the idea of a birthday this year. 31 seems kinda the sucks. Lauren insisted. I said “OK, whatever” but she turned it into something really special. A great big thanks is owed to her because not only did she do all the arranging: she also baked the finest deserts imaginable: Chocolate Satin Icing Cupcakes and cherry pie. To say what Lauren made were “cupcakes” is liking saying a Rothko is “a painting”. They were spectacular and her cherry pie, made with delicious, fresh cherries delivered a tart-sweet one-two punch.

The entire event was marked by my recent obsession with love of “Wall·E” and even my Wall·E and EVE figurines made an appearance ( see video, below ).

The cuisine at Threadgills was steaky, fried, cheesy Texas heart-attack fare. It was delicious.

At the end of festivities, we bade farewell to our guests and headed over to check out the “White Ghost Shivers” who were playing at the outdoor pavilion. WGS are a downright ribald “hot string” / ragtime band. Their favorite song topics usually involve: hooch, stickiest of the icky, women of questionable morals, entendres, silliness, The Charleston, and waking up in strange places with strange people. Match this with slide whistles, banjos, clarinets, the occasional ukelele, and some devil-summoning fiddle work, you have a great musical time.

We made it out to the dance, er, field, and tried to keep up. A bit of Balboa on the fast songs, a bit of lindy-hop on the slow, we managed to kick up some dust and enjoy the show in a new way.

We drove back home and as we crossed the 183 split the clock turned past midnight, a birth-day was done.

Thanks again to all those who came out and most of all to my dearest, most wonderful girlfriend who made the day magical for even curmudgeonly old me.