Alan’s Anecdotes

As anybody who follows me on twitter knows, we recently caught two stray kittens who were living in our backyard for a few weeks. At first, we figured they were feral but later concluded that they were too healthy and calm to have been born and raised in the wild. The vet agreed that they weren’t feral. Somebody probably abandoned them outside near our house, and they subsequently made their way to our backyard deck, spotting our indoor cats who often sit inside near the window.

We originally planned on adopting them out, but as time went on we couldn’t bear the thought of doing that. So… now we have four cats: two kittens and two senior (12 years old) cats. The kittens are being kept in a guest bedroom until they get used to us and the other cats enough that they can have free roam of the house.

In true geek fashion, their names are Mal (named after Malcom Reynolds) and Captain Jack (named after Jack Harkness). For the record, my wife came up with Captain Jack’s name. We originally thought that Captain Jack was female, but close examination by the vet proved otherwise. His original name was Zoe (named after Zoe Washburne). Yeah, we had a Firefly theme going.

One of these days, I’ll post pictures to my Flickr account. In the meantime, I wonder if I need the “Crazy Old Cat Guy” tag in SL.

In response to Josie’s post, here are my eight favorite albums of all time. Since I didn’t have Napster or iTunes (or even MP3s) during my formative music listening years, my unit of measurement is an album and not a single.

The astute reader will notice that only one album was produced after 1990. I consider the hallmark of a classic to be an album that still holds up 10, 20, or even 30 years after first listening to it. Given that criteria, my list will be skewed towards the “classics”. At least they aren’t in the classical section of the music store. Yet.

8. Soundtrack, “Run, Lola, Run” - The album I listen to when doing hard core programming. About as close to listening to Techno as I get.

7. Big Audio Dynamite, “Megatop Phoenix” - Seems to get mixed reviews, but it works very well for me.

6. Miles Davis, “Kind of Blue” - The album that turned me on to Jazz.

5. INXS, “Kick” - The album that brings back the best college memories.

4. The Boomtown Rats, “Fine Art of Surfacing” - I never tire of listening to this album. Probably the most widely underrated one of the list.

3. Bruce Springsteen, “Born to Run” - Far and away Springsteen’s best album. Songs like “Thunder Road” and “Jungleland” still send chills down my spine.

2. The Beatles, “Abbey Road” - The definitive Beatles album, even beating out “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band”.

1. Pink Floyd, “Dark Side of the Moon” - Yeah, it’s a cliche but still my favorite album after first listening to it almost 30 years ago. I once owned all of the Pink Floyd albums on cassette, and none have held up like “Dark Side of the Moon”. Billboard had to change the album ranking rules to get it off the charts.

In the spirit of the original post, feel free to list your favorite albums/songs in the comments or on your blog. Give yourself bonus points if you’ve heard “Dark Side of the Moon” in quadraphonic sound.

I was asked the other day when I was going to post more SL pics to Flickr. I replied that I still don’t feel like posting anything. Yeah, it’s been quite a while now.

One possible explanation is that this is one hobby out of a million different interests. While growing up, my mom made several comments about how I seemed to have so many different hobbies; however, I think this was all in the context of cleaning my room.

Another possible explanation is that I haven’t set aside any time in RL to devote to photography, and SL reflects that. I’ve noticed that there seems to be a direct correlation between actively taking photos in RL and in SL.

For now, I’ve settled on the idea that I just need a good swift kick in the ass to jump start my interest. And luckily for me, I will be going on vacation in two weeks up to Alaska. In preparation, I bought another 2 GB memory card, bringing my total up to 5 GB (which was the size of my hard drive 10 years ago). I will not have running out of storage space as an excuse. I think having some new and exciting stuff to photograph will do me a world of good. As a byproduct, I think I’ll start posting on my SL Flickr account. Time will soon tell.

This morning, while avoiding work, I was looking up people to add to my RL Linkedin account. I tracked down an old coworker named Roy who has since moved to Seattle and is now working for Microsoft. We worked together on the same team for around 6 months, but I’ll always remember him for something that happened a while back.

Back sometime in 2001, I’m in the break room talking to Roy for a few minutes. In the meantime, some woman, who is at least 6 ft tall with long arms, walks into the break room to get some ice from the ice machine. My back is facing the ice machine so I only notice her out of the corner of my eye. As the woman is slowly lifting the front cover of the ice machine, I’m exactly positioned so that one corner of the lid slowly touches my butt. It had felt as if the woman had reached over (she had long arms) and gently grabbed my ass. I’m sure the look on my face was priceless; however, Roy didn’t so much as change his facial expression the whole time he was talking to me. I have long since admired his ability to keep such a straight face.

I hope you all enjoyed this amusing little tale. And yeah, there was sexual harassment training for everyone a few months before this happened.

Yeah, another book meme. I figure it’s better than not posting, and you do get to at least learn something about me in the process. I have a couple of half-finished posts that I keep meaning to work on.

According to a LibraryThing survey, these 106 works are the ones most often marked as “unread”, That is, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded.

Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones read solely as a curriculum requirement, italicize the ones you started, but didn’t finish.

Final touch: denote (*) the ones you liked, and would (or did) read again or recommend. Even if you did read them for school in the first place.

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses
Madame Bovary
The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
Jane Eyre
The Tale of Two Cities
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The fates of human societies
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The Iliad
Emma
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
Mrs. Dalloway
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books
Memoirs of a Geisha
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
Middlemarch
*Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
*The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
*1984
Angels & Demons
The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise)
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
*One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
To the Lighthouse
Tess of the D’Urbervilles
Oliver Twist
Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time
*Dune
*The Prince
The Sound and the Fury
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces
A Short History of Nearly Everything
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
*Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
*The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
*Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers

Of the books I’ve read on this list, I’d say “1984″ is my favorite. “Dune” is second. One of the things I noticed on the second reading of “Dune” is that Frank Herbert has trouble writing inter-personal relationships. It really shows in the scene where Jessica befriends Stilgar.

You know you’re a geek when the first thing you do after moving offices at work is go to Home Depot to buy plastic cable wraps to take care of the cabling for all your computers (three to be exact: one development box, and two test servers).

This week I learned:

1. That the sight of blood and other icky stuff doesn’t gross me out nearly as much as it did in the past.
2. That a cat who is smart enough to almost instantly learn a new place she isn’t supposed to sit at in order to get attention is dumb enough to chew on a leaf dangerous to cats. Fortunately, the only harm done was losing her dinner.
3. That once again, you don’t pick your house projects, they pick you. This time it was installing a railing for the steps in the garage. Yeah, something the builder should have done.
4. That when my father-in-law says, “we’ll work on this tomorrow”, he really means, “in an hour I’m going to decide to work on it anyway”.
5. That the best way to fix a gas trimmer which won’t start is to show somebody what’s wrong with it.

With any luck, in a few days I’ll get back to my semi-regularly scheduled deep thoughts.

Been busy the past week, and I won’t be in-world the upcoming week because of RL. I may blog if the mood strikes me.

Since I was implicitly tagged by Josie to do the book meme, and I’m sitting right next to a bookcase, I’ll pick one from my “to read” pile.

“Pandora’s Star” by Peter F. Hamilton. British SF author for those who don’t know. Turning to page 123 and counting to the fifth sentence. Here are the fifth, sixth, and seventh sentences:

There was definitely vodka in it, she could feel the distinctive chill burning along her throat. The recovery vehicles sent out from the main convoy had picked her up twenty hours ago. Which had come as a profound relief; two and a half days alone in the temperate forest was slightly more wilderness adventure than she wanted.

And, in the spirit of “recycled memes”, I’ll let people tag themselves. Everyone go forth and post about your books if you haven’t already done so.

So I was going through my Google documents a few days ago when I stumbled upon what looked like a draft to a response to a Second Life Insider article written by Akela Talamasca back in September, 2006 (made obvious by the fact that I mentioned his name). A little investigative digging, based on the date of the document, turned up this article.

The article talked about how easy it was to hide your identity and other aspects of yourself in SL. In addition, Akela mentioned:

“And yet, it’s ridiculously easy to feel that you have trustworthy friends and loved ones in SL. [various explanations excluded] Whatever it is, it’s frequently the case that people fall into each other’s lives much more readily in SL than they do in RL, but with much less forethought about possible harm.”

My response, which appears in the comments section, was:

“On the topic of misplaced trust, I think the reason it’s ridiculously easy to feel that you have trustworthy friends and loved ones in SL is because of what Akela said: the lack of subliminals such as tone of voice, body language, and word choice. Perhaps an avatar’s detailed appearance, somatic tics, and preset idle animations help convey a positive non-verbal impression which leads to a false sense of security where one would normally be cautious. It’s much harder to mask or have deceitful body language than it is to lie in a conversation.

Personally, sometimes I feel uncomfortable having conversations in SL with people of any shape, form, or gender because of the lack of non-verbal feedback. In those cases, it feels like I’m talking with ear plugs on (hope that analogy makes sense).”

Most of the time, I look back at stuff that I wrote which is more than a year old and cringe. But this seems to have held up pretty well in the year and a half since I wrote it. In addition, it was written after being in SL for only a month.

At the time the article was written, I had considered the lack of non-verbal communication to be an almost insurmountable barrier. It was one of the reasons I almost left SL back then. In RL, I’m very conscious of and rely heavily on non-verbal communication. I’ll deliberately make use of it in conversation in order to achieve some desired effect.

Fast forward to today, and obviously I have not left SL. I’ve compensated for the lack of non-verbal feedback by waiting, sometimes very long, to make discernments about other people. In some cases I’ve known people for almost a year in SL before becoming friends. That tends to be the opposite of what I do in RL, where I decide far more quickly.

A year and a half later, I can’t think of much to add to what I said, which tends to be unusual. Perhaps I’ll check back in another year or year and a half and see how it holds up.