| (no subject) |
[Dec. 19th, 2009|09:12 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | The Arctic Circle - Final Fantasy | ] |
Will be back in MN starting tomorrow until Jan 4! Call me: 612-208-8875. Or email. |
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| Thoughts on Working Retail (Again) During the Holidays |
[Dec. 17th, 2009|10:41 pm] |
| [ | mood |
| | wow this got long | ] |
- It's not that bad.
Expanding on that: Trader Joe's customers are, in my experience, pleasant enough people; sure, some of them don't seem to make the small talk that I'm supposed to make, and some of them talk on their cell phones all the way through checking out, but I probably didn't want to talk to them much anyway. No one's snapped at me, no one's been grouchy. Either I'm lucky or my people skills are better than I assume.
Do I feel like I'm wasting my time or squandering my potential? Well... I'm not drained enough at the end of the day to keep me from writing songs or designing web sites. Would I be, if I had a more substantial job? I don't know.
I almost feel like my level of satisfaction with my life depends more on having sufficient free time to do interesting things in it, and enough energy to want to, than it does on the specifics of the job I'm doing for money. The problem is, I like my hobbies in small doses, but (as I think I've said) I wouldn't want to make a career out of any of them.
- Most tolerable Christmas music: Pretty much any rendition of Carol of the Bells. Pretty much the entirety of the Nutcracker Suite. The Charlie Brown theme (I guess it's called "Linus and Lucy?" I never knew). Most renditions of "Christmas Baby Please Come Home." To a lesser extent, many renditions of "Feliz Navidad," aside from one where the singer decided it would be way better if he stretched it way out like: "Feliiiiiiiiiiiiiz navidaaaaad" and was very incorrect; I hadn't realized until then that the whole appeal of the song is the crisp punchiness of the... verse, I guess? Also the word "Felicidad." I'd probably hate the song if I knew Spanish.
Honorable mentions go to some Xmas song the Barenaked Ladies did; I have to admit I still kinda like them even if the crappy singer sings it (maybe it was recorded after the good one got busted for possession of cocaine) and several versions of Run Run Rudolph, if only because they remind me that the Mountain Goats covered it and it rocks comparatively harder than most other Xmas songs, especially "Jingle Bell Rock," probably the biggest song misnomer of all time.
- Least tolerable Christmas music: Pretty much any Kenny G, because it reminds me that I used to like that schmaltzy, gimmicky son of a bitch. Any song with a child singer, especially the ones who sound like they're eight years old but still have way better vibrato than I even will, not because I'm jealous but because they give me an icky feeling inside and I have pretty much a natural inclination to want to punch loud kids in the face. Especially this one version of "I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus," one of the least tolerable Xmas songs in the best of conditions, with one of the aforementioned
amazing vibrato'd kids singing virtuosically but also saying, in an unfathomably annoying voice, in between verses, "I did see Mommy kissing Santa Claus! I did! You gotta believe me!" Its teeth-grinding obnoxious treacliness must be heard to be believed, or better yet, not.
Where was I? Oh yeah. Any song where someone tries to take one of the old standbys — "Jingle Bells," "Deck the Halls," "Let It Snow," etc. — and rock, funk, soul, swing or otherwise modernize it up. Generally the more ambitious the modifications the worse the result. And the big shit prize goes to basically every rendition of "Santa Baby," of which there seem to be about 4 million by every fucking half-rate also-ran staggering mediocrity of a female singer in existence trying to get people to like her by singing a song everyone knows. And even if the delivery weren't so often total shit — many of these ladies sound like they're half-asleep, or like they think the "kiss goodnight" line in "Let It Snow" is kind of racy; come on, ladies, it's called "Santa Baby," fucking sex it up a little! — the lyrics are painful materialistic tripe. As much as I want to believe they're tongue in cheek, it's really difficult, and the line "I want a yacht and really that's not / A lot" is funny maybe the first 2 times and cringe-inducing thereafter.
- Xmas music I don't really know what to think of: Big WTF on the Chipmunks (Alvin, Simon and Theodore, not Chip and Dale) Xmas song. I mean, it's three dudes whose voices have been I guess sped up to raise the pitch, which is about as gimmicky and idiotic-sounding as you can get, but on the other hand this song has some really good harmonies in it, and the effects on the vocals really crisp them up. So I was relieved to find I didn't totally hate this one.
Also there's some punk-ish song whose chorus goes "It's Christmas, and I want everything / I just can't wait," and I suspect someone's calling bullshit on the materialism of the season but it's kind of hard to tell these days. Real punk would be, I think. But real punk probably wouldn't be playing in Trader Joe's.
- Off the topic of Xmas: some thoughts about the Professional Smile, which I'll let David Foster Wallace describe:
You know this smile: the strenuous contraction of circumoral fascia with incomplete zygomatic involvement, the smile that doesn't quite reach the smiler's eyes and that signifies nothing more than a calculated attempt to advance the smiler's own interests by pretending to like the smilee. Why do employers and supervisors force professional service people to broadcast the Professional Smile? Am I the only consumer in whom high doses of such a smile produce despair?
Who do they think is fooled by the Professional Smile?
And yet the Professional Smile's absence now also causes despair. Anybody who has ever bought a pack of gum at a Manhattan cigar store or asked for something to be stamped FRAGILE at a Chicago post office or tried to obtain a glass of water from a South Boston waitress knows well the soul-crushing effect of a service workers scowl, ie. the humiliation and resentment of being denied the Professional Smile. And the Professional Smile has by now skewed even my resentment at the dreaded Professional Scowl: I walk away from the Manhattan tobacconist resenting not the counterman's character or absence of good will but his lack of professionalism in denying me the Smile. What a fucking mess.
This quote is part of the excerpt that Wikipedia takes from its article on one of Wallace's books, and even if it weren't I'd wonder how many people who visit our TJ's have read it and agree that the Professional Smile causes despair. Even if I don't give a rat's about most of our customers, I can still agree that the last thing I want to be doing is causing despair in them (even if I can't imagine that Professional Smile-related despair is going to be a Hot Item in my three-month performance review next month), but as DFW notes, I'm in kind of a double bind unless I can somehow manage to conjure up an authentic smile for each and every customer, which is of course impossible even if I usually don't mind being at work.
Okay: Not everyone is as smart as DFW, of course. (I might argue that no living person is.) But you don't have to be that smart to realize that there's usually no actual personal investment in the Professional Smile and to, yes, suffer despair as a result.
I don't really have any answers re: this. Sometimes my co-workers do really obviously customer service-y things that make me feel despair even though I'm not their object. I felt despair, of a sort, upon hearing the "If you can't ring it up, it must be free, right?" joke for the third time and realizing that I'd probably made it myself at least once: there's nothing new under the sun, oh and by the way you're not clever.
I guess I just try to strike a balance between being courteous and beaming a fake high-wattage smile at everyone. I'd rather talk over someone's head than talk down to them because that's how I'd prefer people to interact with me, even though so much of customer service seems to involve talking down to people. (This is why I hate dealing with kids.)
Sometimes it really does seem like the full-timers at Trader Joe's earn the shit out of their money, not by working long hours, but by being able to enjoy what they're doing enough to maintain, for most of the day, a smile that's not a Professional one. It's not what I want to do with my life, I think. But I have to respect people who can pull it off.
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| ORNITHOLOGY HO |
[Dec. 10th, 2009|10:05 am] |
I think I saw one of these the other day!
It's called a Belted Kingfisher and I've never seen a kingfisher of any kind before. Exciting!
Did you know that the namesake for James Bond was an ornithologist? Wikipedia told me. |
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| it's another song! |
[Dec. 9th, 2009|08:55 pm] |
I'm convinced my songwriting and recording abilities have improved by leaps and bounds since way back when I made Rufous and The Semiotician's Breakup Song available to y'all, because back then there was no way I would have been able to write and record my newest hit single My Mouth in about two weeks like I did just now.
Hope you like it. |
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| Thanksgiving |
[Nov. 28th, 2009|01:12 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | Million - the Mountain Goats | ] |
Food denoted "TJ's" came from Trader Joe's more or less prepared; the soycutash was frozen, the pilaf assembled but with the rice uncooked, and the pork tenderloin marinated but raw. Everything else was homemade from scratch using raw vegetables, spices, etc.
I'm probably as amazed that I managed to have it all warm on the table simultaneously as I am that everything came out well. Nevertheless, these two things happened. |
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| "Hi, We're Not The Mountain Goats" |
[Nov. 27th, 2009|05:26 pm] |
So through a pretty gargantuan effort on the part of a couple dudes on the Mountain Goats forums, there's now a fan-created 34-track Mountain Goats cover album, um... extant, with cover art (seen above) and a webpage and actual physical CDs that are going to be sold at the Mountain Goats shows tonight and tomorrow, with all profits going to Farm Sanctuary, one of John Darnielle's favorite places.
You can download the album in one of three ways: snag the torrent, which I'll be seeding for a while, or get it from MediaFire or MegaUpload.
Each person chose a song that they wanted covered and then was randomly assigned another person's choice to cover. The song I chose was "Narakaloka," the original version of which you can hear here, and read about why I chose it here. The cover is available here, and I really like what the singer El Nombre did with it, particularly the piano line and the change to a minor key.
I was given the song "If You See Light," whose original version I've made available here. It's probably the liveliest track of the otherwise very downcast and difficult Get Lonely album, and my cover does nothing to change this, though I do make many other significant changes that you can read about here. As I say there, it was a lot of work. It was a lot of fun as well.
I suspect that many of you will only be interested in the parts of this project that I was involved in, but if you do decide to download the whole thing, please consider making a donation to Farm Sanctuary. |
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| hi how is the weather |
[Nov. 16th, 2009|05:40 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | The Impulse - The Flaming Lips | ] |
I'm home from work sick today. I'm not really really sick, but I've had a mild cold for the last 5 days and it's finally become a more or less normal cold today. Also this would have been my 6th day of work in a row and I'm just not up for it.
Hi, how are you doing. If you're reading this, you can be sure that I miss you. To those of you who are in MN, I'm sure your weather is pretty cold right about now, but as you can see we have our own weather problems here in the Seattle area:
So there's that.
The other day, at work, I was working the register right in front of the doors out, and it was maybe like 40 or 45 degrees outside, and a lady asked me if I got cold at that register, and described the weather as "bone-chilling." It was all I could do not to laugh in her face.
Work at Trader Joe's is decent. It's the kind of job where I generally don't feel like going, but I don't mind it when I'm there, and most days eight hours flies by a lot faster than I expect them to. The customers are by and large extremely pleasant to deal with, and there are a lot more French speakers in this area than in the Twin Cities. I don't know why. In fact it's a pretty diverse area in general, though it tends toward the more affluent types of diversity: lots of Asians of all kinds who I assume like 50% of them work at Microsoft.
Despite the rain I'm still biking everywhere. I've put together my entire ridiculous-looking ensemble of: bright yellow rain jacket, bright yellow rain pants, and black "booties" to go over my shoes and keep my feet dry while still allowing me to clip into my pedals. I was talking to a co-worker and he observed that with the money saved on car insurance and gas, I could probably afford to buy a new bike every year, or even more often if I got a cheaper one. It kind of made me want to get a new bike. But I'll want to save for a little while first and see what happens to my checking account if I spend and save at normal levels.
Jenn and I went to a Mountain Goats concert six days ago. I don't know how many of you taken my absurd sycophancy as inducement to check tMG out in any kind of substantial way, and so I don't know how many of you this will mean anything to, but we got to hear Orange Ball of Peace (a minute-and-a-half long song from some obscure old album that got re-released on a compilation recently); Sign of the Crow (an unreleased song that I don't even have any recordings of, I think, with the memorable chorus "Of the several things that you have to do today / You're gonna regret one / This generation looks for a sign / It isn't gonna get one"); Going to Bristol (a roughly decade-and-a-half old song) with the guitar part rearranged for violin; and a totally kickass full-band performance of Against Pollution (a fairly recent song, and one that I'm fond of, not least for its opening verse "When I worked down at the liquor store / Guy with a shotgun came raging through the place / Muscled his way behind the counter / I shot him in the face"). Also got to hear some standbys and singles: Woke Up New, for one, as well as The Best Ever Death Metal Band in Denton, This Year and of course the immortal No Children.
You're doubtless even less likely to have listened to Final Fantasy (yes there is a band named Final Fantasy, and yes they opened for the Mountain Goats, really it is just one guy named Owen Pallett), but they were really excellent as well, doing some amazing things with a delay pedal to replicate some very intricate songs live.
I guess that's pretty much it for now. Did I mention that I miss you? I do. |
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| HEY-O UNQUALIFIED CS MAJOR HERE, GIMME A JOB |
[Oct. 7th, 2009|09:35 pm] |
I have a phone interview with Amazon in a couple days and I'm really not hopeful about it, which I know is not the right attitude to take but it's hard to be anything else. The last phone interview I had for this kind of position (software developer) was kind of an embarrassing fiasco, and I have no real reason to believe this one will be any different.
The long and short of it is, I have no significant programming experience. I mean, I did a capstone project at Mac, sure, but it was more or less just a misshapen appendage on my math capstone (which wasn't exactly hot shit either, aside from the typesetting), and plus it was in Python and who writes applications in Python. The last time I did C++ was in high school. High school. Oh and did I mention they let me get a CS degree without ever learning a functional programming language? I feel as if that's kind of like getting a master's in math without ever taking a course in differential equations! (Yup, also did that.)
Point is I've never really done a large programming project of any kind. Pretty much I have a CS degree and what it means for me is I can learn scripting languages OK. I'm told the interview "will include coding, data structures, algorithms and/or design questions" and I guess I maybe know something about a couple of those? But my overall feeling is did these people even look at my resume? I'm not even sure this is the position I applied for.
I'm sure some of you have been in something like my position and I'm wondering if you have any advice for me. I mean it's not a huge deal at this point, since I do have a job, but I'd like to not embarrass myself as much as possible. |
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| And you can't cant settle down until the idiot in your blood settles down |
[Oct. 5th, 2009|11:48 am] |
| [ | music |
| | Idiot Heart - Sunset Rubdown | ] |
Ok, I think I owe someone a post.
So a couple weekends ago I went hiking with my friend Will (WHAT UP WILL) and two of his housemates in Goat Rocks Wilderness south of Seattle or north of Portland depending on your point of reference. It was really freaking awesome to see Will again; he's a friend from high school who's living in Portland and I was surprised how easy and cheap it was to hop on a train and visit.
The hike itself was good; I think it was the first hike I've been on where I actually brought enough shit on foot to spend the night in the wilderness. It rained for pretty much the entire first day, and I wasn't really ready for cold weather, but in a way being miserable and cold is part of the experience, right? Maybe? Anyway I wasn't really miserable because everyone else was upbeat and awesome. We scaled the third highest peak in Oregon, apparently, and my camera didn't work but my companions took many pictures, one of which is my (finally!) new facebook profile picture (in which you can see Mt. Rainier in the background). You can see more here (starting at the 8th one) and here, maybe, I'm not sure how viewing photos works if you don't have the person friended.
So there's that. Also I got a job, though it's just one that will pay the bills. Trader Joe's is opening a store in Redmond and they hired me and 60-some other people from a pool of (so they say) about 400 applicants. So apparently I'm in the 85th percentile of grocery store workers? The store is literally about a 5-minute bike ride from my apartment, too.
Since the Redmond store's not open, they've been shipping us new hires out to different stores. The results have varied, but not too widely, and the vibe has been pretty good at all the stores. All in all I think it will be a good place to work for however many months it takes me to break into the actuarial biz. It doesn't hurt that they're paying me pretty well and the benefits are basically top-notch.
The hike and the job have been the two big news items, basically, but I should mention a couple music-related things for people who take my music advice. I don't listen to as much new stuff now that I'm off eMusic, but the album I'm listening to as I write this (Sunset Rubdown's Dragonslayer) is incredibly good. Also the new Mountain Goats album The Life of the World to Come — all of whose songs are titled after Bible verses† (!) — is coming out I think tomorrow. THE MOUNTAIN GOATS YOU GUYS, STILL THE BEST BAND EVER.
Jenn doesn't have a LJ and if she did she wouldn't have time to post in it, so I'll just tell you that DigiPen is keeping her real busy but I think she's having a good time. Also she's rocking it, which should come as no surprise to those of you who saw her sketchbook over the summer. There is the expected contingent of socially inept post-high-school dudes there, apparently, but also some cool older students some of whom I hung out with last night while they all worked frantically on their sketchbook assignment de la semaine†† (Typically about 50 pages a week, with 4 drawings per page, just so's you have an idea). I've been joking that my new goal is to be her kept man; once she finishes school and gets her high-paying game designer job, I'll quit whatever I'm doing and cook for us full time. This is not for real.
That's where we're at. Don't let me forget to post, you guys. Keep in touch. I leave you with this Facebook ad and a thought:
WHAT THE SHIT
† Quoth John Darnielle, main songwriter, on this: 'I guess the obvious question is going to be: "John, have you had some sort of religious awakening?" and while I guess lots of people might want to be coy about answering that, that's never really been my style, so: no. It's not like that. It's not some heavy-narrative-distance deal either, though, and it's not a screed. It's twelve new songs: twelve hard lessons the Bible taught me, kind of.'
†† "Of the week." |
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| No Knead Bread |
[Sep. 13th, 2009|04:01 pm] |
Wow. OMG. Amazing.
My very first loaf of bread from scratch turned out basically perfect: moist and soft on the inside, hard and crackly crust, everything that the source claimed it would be. The secret, in a nutshell: let the dough sit at room temperature for 18 hours instead of kneading.
If you have any interest in baking I strongly urge you to try this. I never would have believed my first loaf of bread would be this good.
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 12th, 2009|10:34 pm] |
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Sweet potato brulée, homemade turkey meatballs and homemade gravy for dinner tonight. It was amazing, if I do say so myself. |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 9th, 2009|02:02 pm] |
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Man, I really wish I had some actual programming experience. |
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| (no subject) |
[Sep. 7th, 2009|12:34 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | I'm Going Away - The Fiery Furnaces | ] |
Ok, so.
Jenn and I are in Redmond, pretty much settled into the new apartment (which is very nice, and on the top of an absurdly steep hill) and more or less ready to start doing The Stuff We Have To Do: she starting school, I finding a job.
We've been doing a lot of cooking to get the place broken in, including:
- quinoa and corn chili (in the pressure cooker)
- lentil and sweet potato "stew" (ditto) over Israeli couscous
- barley and mushroom "risotto"
- cornbread (for the chili)
- biscuits (for the stew) and sausage gravy (for the leftovers the next morning)
- pseudo-eggs benedict (the homemade hollandaise separated, oh well)
It's been good for helping the matter of "yes we are really living together" to sink in, and now we have lots of leftovers for when Jenn, at least, has less time for cooking. Hopefully I will too, soon.
The job search is going much the same way it usually does: swinging between world-hatingly depressing and almost tolerable at the drop of a hat. Nevertheless I'm sending out those applications — for jobs for which my qualifications, on paper, range from marginal to nonexistent — into the unresponsive void and hoping to hear back. Tomorrow, I hope, I'll be biking around town and collecting applications at the Trader Joe's and the like, in the hopes of getting some income flow while I continue to chase the big bucks.
I miss you all dearly. Keep in touch, please. |
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| WHAT |
[Aug. 6th, 2009|11:44 pm] |
BEET MUFFINS?!!?
YOU BET YOUR FUCKIN ASS
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| (no subject) |
[Aug. 4th, 2009|08:37 pm] |
| [ | music |
| | Store - the Mountain Goats - Live | ] |
From the Department of If I Tell People I'm Gonna Do It, I'd Better Damn Do It:
I'll probably be playing what people in the industry call a "set" at my going away party. It will include easy songs by some of my favorite musicians, and will feature the Mountain Goats prominently, big surprise. Also, probably: Okkervil River, The Decemberists, The Fiery Furnaces and at least a couple originals including, perhaps, a SECRET SONG ONLY ONE PERSON HAS HEARD EVER.
If you post requests in this thread I will consider them, provided they are arrangeable for acoustic guitar, fairly easy to play, and not shit. |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 14th, 2009|10:17 pm] |
Now that I've passed the actuarial exam I get to start job searching in earnest. Yay!
:(
Is that why I have a headache? |
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| (no subject) |
[Jul. 12th, 2009|12:32 am] |
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Passed the actuarial exam. Have to wait 8 weeks to find out how well I actually did. |
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| easy as soup |
[Jul. 10th, 2009|05:03 pm] |
| [ | Tags | | | jenn, math | ] |
| [ | music |
| | On Tour With Zykos - Okkervil River | ] |
So I was doing a practice test for the actuarial exam I'm taking tomorrow, and there was a problem that went something like:
Mike has a bowl of soup with 5 noodles in it. He reaches into the soup, takes two noodle ends, ties them together, and puts them back. Then he repeats the process 4 more times, so that all the noodle ends are tied together. If he reaches into the soup again, what's the probability that he pulls out a garland (the problem actually used this term, I remember quite clearly) with all five noodles?
The practice test described its difficulty as being 4 out of 5 stars, which is as hard as any of the problems I've encountered on the 4 practice tests I've done. Here's what happened...
If you want to try to do this problem yourself, minor spoilers (in the form of the method that didn't work) follow.
My initial response to the problem was, as it probably was for many others, "WTF?" because it seemed quite difficult to impose any kind of structure on it. In fact, it's not that hard to make some sense of it, and before long I was trying to divide the number of ways to tie the noodles into one long loop by the total number of ways to tie the noodles.
The combinatorics involved were pretty heavy. I think, but I'm not sure, that the number of ways to get a garland is 5! * 25, because you have to put the five noodles in order and then each one can be reversed in place. It may then be necessary to divide by 5 to eliminate loops that are identical but just shifted, or it might be okay to treat them as distinct if you do so for the number of ways to tie the noodles as well. Anyway it doesn't really matter, because finding that latter number is quite difficult, and I messed around with it for a while before running out of time.
If you're still working on it, the answer follows.
So I told Jenn about this problem in the car on the way to her house, and in about three minutes, she said (all quotes are paraphrased), "Well, the first time he picks an end to tie, there's only one chance in nine of making a loop and making it impossible to get a garland. If he doesn't, then it's like there's only four noodles left, because two have been combined into one."
Boom, light bulb. The rest follows by induction (in fact, when I looked later, the practice test gave the solution for n noodles). For the first tying, there's an 8/9 chance that you tie two noodles together (rather than tying one to itself, making a little loop, and making it impossible to get a garland). If you do that, then for the next tying you pick one end out, there are seven ends left to tie it to, and only one that will make a small loop and keep you from getting a garland. So there's a 6/7 chance you can keep going. And so on for the next two. So the answer is (8/9)(6/7)(4/5)(2/3); after the first four ties, you have just one long noodle and it's impossible not to make a garland. Such an elegant solution, particularly so since it can be generalized easily.
It's a cool problem. Jenn was worried that she deflated my ego by getting it when I couldn't, but I think I was stuck in a rut (and I'd just been working on other problems for two and a half hours) so I cut myself some slack and my ego remained unscathed. I did well on the practice test overall, and I'm feeling pretty confident about the exam tomorrow. And my girlfriend is really smart. <3 |
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