Blog

My friend and colleague, E. E. Giorgi, is a mathematician by day and a novelist by night.  (Keep your eyes open for the Chimeras books.  They are destined for great things.)   EEG also maintains a blog that features interviews with interesting writers who juggle creative and technical endeavors in different parts of their lives.  (Witness the recent interview with multi-award-nominee and writing powerhouse Aliette de Bodard.)

The really fascinating people weren’t available this week, but I did my best to be a decent followup to Aliette’s interview.  Our conversation is posted here.

When I was 20, I spent much of that year getting about 4 hours of sleep per night.   I was in school at the time, and I was younger, and that sort of thing was more or less the norm.  And somehow I was able to function that way.  Maybe not brilliantly, but somehow I managed.  I did well in school, and worked on the side, and found time to have friends.  That isn’t to say it was fun; it did catch up with me from time to time.  (Like the time I slept through a presentation my lab partner and I were supposed to give at our Experimental Methods class.  The problem being that I had the poster.)  But somehow, for the most part, I knew that as long as I had at least 4 hours of sleep I could make it through the following day.  Painfully, perhaps, but I’d manage.

I’ve never been a big fan of the bona fide all nighter.  I did that only rarely.   Even so, I didn’t get a lot of sleep that year.

Until near the end of the academic year, when I contracted a very mild case of mononucleosis.

was the name of a Sunday-morning radio show that I frequently enjoyed whien I lived in upstate New York. 

It’s also how I spent my Saturday morning, after (finally) recovering many gigabytes of music from the dead laptop. 

So far, as far as my own personal usage patterns go, the new Mac gets a solid “A” in every category except one.

Fewer people than normal at the bus stop this morning.  That’s always a good sign, because it means a less crowded and more quiet ride to work.  And the bus was strangely clean, almost sparkly, as if it had been washed,or perhaps sprinkled with unicorn dust.  So that was nice.

Until the lady two rows in front of me started having an argument on her cell phone.  For the next 45 minutes. Loud enough, mind you, that several people dragged out headphones to try to drown her out.

Including the guy directly behind me, who decided the best way to deal with her annoyance was to listen to speed metal at full volume.  For the next 45 minutes.  Loud enough, mind you, that I could hear it just as clearly as if the headphones were cupping my ears.   And I am not, in general, a huge fan of speed metal. 

So, to you, Cell-Phone Lady, I say:  thank you for sharing the intimate details of your sister’s divorce with the rest of us.  And to you, Speed Metal Guy, I say: thank you for broadening my musical horizons against my will.  Also, I hope you both get bitten by stray dogs.  And that the dogs run away and you can’t find them to determine whether they have rabies, so you have to go in for the rabies vaccine and that it’s really uncomfortable.  Just like in that episode of Different Strokes.

My trusty laptop died earlier this summer.  Well, it didn’t really die so much as start wetting the bed and wandering around the house in 3-sizes-too-small Underoos while calling me “StackOverflow” and demanding that I make it a milkshake right bloody now because otherwise we won’t get to the Copa in time to catch Benny Goodman.

And I didn’t really kill it.  I just, sort of, lobotomized it.  But, like all responsible brain surgeons, I didn’t bother to check to see whether I actually had backups of all the critical driver software before pulling the plug, er, reformatting the hard drive.  Which meant that getting it back up and running wasn’t just a couple of hours of work.  Kinda hard to download replacement drivers when you don’t have a working ethernet card.  

Lesson learned there, I want to promise you.