Tracy is a Dillhole

That's all.

Puget Sound Ferry ridership predictions for 2010

I was reading my local news site when I came across an article about the declining ferry ridership.  Then I noticed this:

Ray Deardorf, planning director for the ferry system, said the state expects ridership to grow to 28.3 million in 2026, a forecast based on economic and population projections.

Seriously?  You just made a prediction 16 years in the future that’s dependent at least in part on technological considerations?  For all you know we’ll have electric-powered hover-ferries by then.  By your logic we should be overflowing with horse carriages by now.

Creating custom shapes in Visio

Okay, this isn’t a tutorial.  I was just looking for a tutorial on creating custom shapes in Visio, and I found this article whose first, prominent custom shape is this:

That’s all I wanted to say.

Why I hate books

When I was in 7th grade, I took a Journalism elective course.  Part of our coursework involved perusing through newspapers for ideas, and I hated this process as much then as I do now.  I liked the course, but I hated reading through newspapers.  I remember one day when I was fed up, I became vocal about it (a common occurrence), and said something similar to the following:

“Ugh, I hate newspapers.  How can we think it’s okay to have to dig through these large, bulky, cumbersome papers that fall apart all the time?  And to make things worse, the articles are never contiguous; you have to jump to some random page to continue the one you started, only leading to more of a mess on your table.”

At this point one of the other students became frustrated at all my complaining, and retorted:

“If you don’t like it, why don’t you make something better!?”

Well, thankfully other people did this for me.  With the World Wide Web and hypertext becoming popular a few years later, newspapers became irrelevant – well, to me, anyway.  Finally, I felt like I was living in the proper decade at least as far as they were concerned.  But this still hadn’t solved the problem with books.

I hate books.  I can’t stand them.  I’m 31 years old and I’ve hated them since I was young.  But it’s not reading that I hate; it’s the form factor of books (and to a greater extent, newspapers).  Reading a book is an activity that is expected to commonly consume long stretches of time, yet books themselves are very poorly designed for this.  There are very simple reasons why, but we’re so programmed from early childhood to merely accept these as “the way things are” that most people think it’s foolish to even raise the objection.  Well, allow me:

- Books, by and large, don’t automatically stay open to the page you’re reading.  You have to manually hold the book open, which is easy enough if you’re reading a page or two, but highly annoying for large periods of time.  The problem becomes worse when you try different reading positions.  Try reading a book while laying on your side, on your bed, for long periods of time.  I guarantee you’ll be uncomfortable within a matter of minutes – either your arm, your back, or your neck.  You’ll find yourself, as I do, constantly turning, switching hands, and shifting around to avoid putting too much strain on a single muscle.  And somehow, nobody complains.

- Assuming you’ve managed to keep your book open and get your allotted amount of reading done, you’ve got to make sure to put a bookmark in it to remember where you left off.  Don’t forget!

- What if you want to search for a particular part of the book, either when a certain event occurred, or where a certain topic is discussed, etc.  Well, this involves scanning through pages manually until you find what you’re looking for.  Or if it’s a textbook, you search the index in the back.  That’s right, this is not a joke: these books have manually-created, fallible indexes in the back which serve to point you to the correct page.  This was necessary back before the computer revolution, but we live in the 21st century.  The fact that we merely accept this as the way things are without trying to improve it is sad.  How many times have you been frustrated trying to find something in a textbook that wasn’t properly included in the index?

- And what if you want to quote part of the book in an article / report / blog entry / email / etc.?  Well, you just read it verbatim and write it down somewhere else, careful not to make any mistakes.

- Uh oh, now it’s nighttime and there’s no natural light.  Better find a reading location near a lamp, or get one of those cute little book lights.  Books don’t light themselves, you know.

- Books can be large, heavy, and take up a lot of space.  Not necessarily, of course, but if you’re like me you read a lot of giant reference texts, and the occasional giant Harry Potter novel.  Packing either of these on a trip is inconvenient, and God forbid you want to bring multiple.  Nevermind the fact that you have to have some place to store your library in your home, i.e. a giant bookshelf.  Time to move to a new home?  Better pack up all those books!  (Anyone who has made the mistake of packing boxes full of books knows just how heavy they are; and they tend not to make this mistake twice.)

- Tens of millions of trees are cut down each year for books in the United States alone!  I am not an outspoken environmentalist, but this is just needless.

 

I swear I was born about 15-20 years before my time.  I feel like I’ve spent my whole life waiting for the world to catch up to my expectations.  Finally, there’s hope.  With the Amazon Kindle and similar readers, we were given products that could solve every single one of the problems I mentioned above.  The new Apple iPad makes the story even better, presenting a multi-purpose content consumption device that can not only store your entire book library but your entire audio library as well (and for some people, their entire video library, but we’ll have to wait just a little longer before that’s true for everyone.)

iDraw

I got a Wacom Bamboo tablet for some game development stuff, but I get lost in doodling.  I want to post random doodles somewhere but I don’t know where, because 1) I don’t want to give the impression that I think they’re good or make sense or anything, 2) I want to be able to upload them easily, and 3) I don’t want many people to be spammed with them.

So I choose my unread blog, Dork Awesome, since, as I said, it has no readers, and I can easily use Windows Live Writer’s copy/paste image functionality to upload them.

Regarding Passive Aggression, Part I

I have very few things that I am boastful of.  Even considering the skills that I’m better at than any of my other skills, I tend to underrate myself.  But one “skill” I have that I will unashamedly boast about is my ability to be passive aggressive.  Yes, I know, you’re undoubtedly thinking it’s not something to be proud of.  That’s an entirely understandable thought from someone of a lesser intellect.  Kidding.

But on my mind lately has been the reason why I’m passive aggressive.  Why do I go out of my way to avoid direct conflict?  There are many situations and motivations which come from different angles, but one unifying theme behind many of them seems to be the general sentiment of:

“Don’t force me to be rude.”

In this post, I’m going to discuss my motivation behind this style of passive aggression.  I quickly realized while writing this that I had at least one other type of passive aggression which does not fall under this theme and it has sufficiently different motivations that it requires a post of its own.

 

Contrary to what many may think, I’m not afraid of being directly rude to people.  In fact, I’m quite satisfied being directly rude to directly rude people.  But on a daily basis, I rarely encounter these sort; this isn’t grade school anymore.  The problem (or blessing) is that we live in a society which has evolved to value kindness and politeness.  This is terrific, in my opinion.  Even if we’re having a bad day, we smile and greet people kindly.  We do our best to fulfill this established social contract.  Often these half-hearted greetings are accused of being “phony”.  Well, sure, the people making them might not be as happy as they let on.  The pessimist might interpret their empty “Have a nice day” as:

“I couldn’t care less what kind of day you have.”

I see it as more than that.  To me, they’re saying:

“I honestly don’t care what kind of day you have, but I’m going to make an effort to be polite because we live in a civilized society and I want to maintain that.”

Oh fair enough, I’m probably being overly optimistic, but I’d much rather live in a society in which everyone at least makes an effort to be polite than one in which people are not civil to one another, dependent largely upon which way the wind is blowing.

Every once in a while, some outlier comes along (or maybe just an innocent person unaware of the implications of their actions) who upsets the balance.  Their own selfishness or thoughtlessness causes them to take more than their fair share, impose their will disproportionately upon others, assert their ego, or something of the sort.  It’s a key point that these people aren’t directly, outwardly rude.  If they were, I’d have no problem calling them out on it directly. 

So here lies the dilemma for the kind, civil person who encounters these people.  Does the kind person rudely tell them to stop hogging all of the laundry machines at the Laundromat?  Of course not; they give the offender the benefit of the doubt.  But… how does the kind person phrase their objection?  If they’re too harsh, then they will be the jerk.  If they’re too soft, the offender won’t know that anything is wrong.  So an internal struggle often ensues, ultimately leading to a resolution which comes across as “passive aggressive”.  The civil person gets their point across by showing the damage caused by the offender, without making any direct accusations.  Perfecting the art of finding that balance is something I struggle with daily.

My Liberal Arts Education, or, What I Remember From the Enlightening Novels I Read Throughout Grade School

I hardly ever find myself inclined to read, though don’t get me wrong, I recognize the value and I strongly want to want to read.

But the public school system helped me loathe reading, by throwing all sorts of way-over-my-head books at me at a young age.  Seriously, you think I had even the slightest interest in reading Ethan Frome when I was in middle school?  I especially hated reading about historical events, whose settings were so utterly unfamiliar to me that 75% of the descriptions were lost on me.  It was hard enough to keep track of settings/characters in a modern story.  But reading about the 1800’s when I’m 13… seriously:

“Buford lay across the wide expanse of bucklechoad, whispering the hymn of an old culoolee while sipping on buttleby.  The swecrepts crawled around him, muskreants of what had chostled his nefferviant thoughts since Chastletown.”

Seriously, WTF?  This was my experience on every page of the books I was forced to read.  And you wonder why I didn’t have any motivation?  And you seriously expect me to context switch repeatedly by opening a fat dictionary and looking up every word I didn’t know (that’s right, no dictionary.com then folks), only to find a definition which contains other words I don’t know, or even worse—variants of the same word as the definition!?

Give me some Harry Potter.  Hell, I’d rather read Twilight than Ethan Frome, and that’s no joke!  I gotta learn to walk before I can crawl, please!  So, needless to say, I often didn’t finish my assigned reading, and even when I did, it didn’t stick with me much.  Let’s see how much I sincerely remember from some of them:

• Ethan Frome: There was some lady, and I assumed she was named Ethan Frome, but that sounds like a guy’s name.  I remember there was some sort of old carriage, so it probably took place in the 1800’s.  That’s all I remember.
  
• The Great Gatsby: I think that the Great Gatsby was a rich guy, like in the 20’s, and I believe there was a swimming pool and he shot himself outside it, but I think I only remember that from the movie, which I watched in class later.  There was a car accident.  I can’t remember if anyone died, but I think a lady did.

 

Dang, I gotta remember the ones for which I didn't see the movie, because I’ll only remember the movies.  So this rules out All Quiet on the Western Front and The Grapes of Wrath.

 

• Hamlet: Some prince went crazy and wanted to kill his family, or maybe that was MacBeth.  There was poison involved and he wanted to commit suicide at some point.
  
• MacBeth: Maybe the same stuff as Hamlet, except there was a graveyard and probably symbolism there.
  
• Heart of Darkness: There were jungles and some crazy guy who went crazy.  I think he was an ivory hunter or else the guy looking for him was, or just ran into them or something.  Colors were used as symbolism, or so my teacher told me.  The line “The Horror, The Horror” was something the crazy guy said.  There were boats going down a river or something.  It was probably in Africa.

There are many more, and some I remember a little more of (Like Crime and Punishment, which I could probably write a small paragraph about.)  But that’s enough for now.