Oh yeah, finally got around to meeting for more than 10 seconds last night. Originally my goal was to meet him at Lucky Creation in china town, and have dinner there. Well the first part of that goal happened. The dinner part didn’t so much, since they’re closed on wednesdays. Erk.

So, we walked back to market, took muni to the church station, and walked down market until we hit ristorante capri. The waiter called me high maintainence (not that it’s not true). Walked around for a bit, then I went home. I was in a strange & funky mood because of being told to piss off earlier that day, but Jim’s company improved the day.

Must rub fuzzy head.

8 job opportunities identified. 0 applied to.

getting my job hunt on

Problem is, I haven’t been. It’s a hard thing for me to do. For several reasons. So, I came up with a metric, far from perfect, but whatever.

Quality of job hunt (add scores together for daily score)
1 – Response to online posted job listing
1 – Follow up on prior interest
2 – Face-to-face contact with individual who can advance job acquisition process
5 – Giving resume directly to the hiring party, while in committed relationship with CEO and gaming with the majority of HR.

Goal of 15 pts/day.

Oh yeah, m-f, no gay.com, no warcraft 3, unless goal is met. Ummm, whee.

Further amendments:

will post itemized daily score.

And for today, target sites include the berkeley hr page, craigslist, ucsf temp pool, uh… Yeah, we’ll see how it goes.

Bleh

So, I was chatting with this kid. He’s pretty internally conflicted between being gay and devoutly religious. Was chatting with him as I was getting ready to go to the Students for A Non-religious Ethos thing on tuesday (the under god in the pledge thing), and I mentioned it to him, and he was all “I’ll pray for you” and I was all “And I hope you come to a reasonable set of assumptions about the universe” and he was all “I’m going to eat some cruelly slaughtered animal product” and I left.

Yesterday, I try to start chatting with him, and he’s generally anti-social, I try to figure out what it is, and he turns into a raging asshole. Saying things like I should leave America, I don’t care at all about my country, I have no beliefs, blah, blah, blah. The kid has alot of self-hatred going on, and apparently decided I was the incarnation of everything he didn’t like about himself. (He had earlier expressed that he felt that the choice between his sexuality and his religion was an either/or thing).

So I told him if he wanted me to leave him alone, that’s all he had to say. He said yes, with some pretty nasty comments on the side, I wished him the best, to which he replied “I don’t have the same wish for you :-)”. I then removed him from my contact list, etc.

And the strange thing is, I actually worry about him. Hope he grows up at some point. <shrug>

One Nation Under God

Went to a talk by Michael Newdow last night, he being the guy suing congress for putting ‘under god’ in the pledge of allegiance, with . We sat in the front row, and exchanged a couple of words with him before he put on his show. met up with us afterwards, and had some very negative opinions of it, mostly regarding the lack of propriety, which is a fair criticism, even if I didn’t care about it. =)

It was interesting. Part informative presentation, part history lecture, part personal story, part rally. One of the parts that found most objectionable were his little interspersed home-written folk songs. (I bought a cd for $10 afterwards, mostly to support his cause). He claimed that one of his major reasons for doing this is to encourage a sort of individual-striving-for-the-common-good that I find quite heartwarming. And I think the folk music worked towards supporting that spirit.

It was also somewhat educational in terms of constitutional law, and the place religion holds in the government.

food for thought

I’m wondering what all my elitist friends think of this one 😉 When I’d heard that flight 93 had crash landed in southwestern Pennsylvanian farm country, I could think of no more plausible explanation than passenger resistance (though I was surprised by the cellular phone element). See also the gang-tackling of the individual trying to light his shoes.

I think that the idea that e pluribus there arises unum, or a few unos, and that these people are not so very different from the rest of us, gives me more faith in humanity than terrorism has taken away, and underscores our lack of need for massively increased security measures.

http://www.livejournal.com/talkpost.bml?journal=politicsforum&itemid=18739
points to
http://www.scifi.com/tribute/citizens_as_soldiers.html

Anniversary

A year ago today, I walked in to work. Or maybe I biked. I was late as was typical for me during the first half of my year as a user services consultant. was flipping out, and I had no idea why. She explained, and at first I didn’t understand, or didn’t believe. My reaction was shock, but I wasn’t surprised by the general thrust of it. That terrorists targeted America didn’t surprise me. That the targets of choice were our corporate and military headquarters didn’t surprise me. That it happened through the airline system didn’t surprise me. I rather glumly observed to Yerin that this was probably the most significant historical event of our lifetimes to date.

Our building was evacuated towards the middle of the day. Apparently, someone had left a briefcase lying around. My reaction was as much incredulity at the reactions of those around me as anything else. This is real life. Losses of civilian life, not to mention property, haven’t happened on American soil, on this scale, in years. It’s also hundreds of miles away, at places that symbolize something far different, and socially far more significant than a high (but not top) ranked technical institution. Let alone a smallish building providing technical services.

Downtown Pittsburgh was evacuated.

This is American courage.

An unpopular sentiment it may be, but it saddens me. Courage is shown most clearly in the control of fear, in the action taken despite it. In spitting in the face of danger. In going into a building that may well collapse, in an attempt to save lives.

This too is American courage.

I object to the word ‘hero’ only because it seems faint praise. It fails to capture, in my mind, the full complexity of actions taken with and despite fear, be they out of duty, out of hope, or out of compassion.

I find our current war a horrific, tragic, and wholly unnecessary memorial to those who have died. Instead of seeking to make the world safer, we’ve made it more dangerous. More dangerous for the innocents inevitably deprived of life in the crossfire, as well as for ourselves and our children, as we create more terrorists, by orphaning more young men, and destroying that which they hold dear.

I hope we develop the wisdom and courage to seek a solution which builds a future of peace, and not one of war.

WTF happened to my brain?

So, last night, was over here working on his math homework. And the only problem I was called in on was actually pretty simple, yet I totally blew it. Say you have two circles, of radii R and r, such that R > r. The smaller circle is partially within the larger circle, such that the line segment formed by the points of intersection between the two circles is the diameter of the smaller circle. Find the area of the smaller circle that is outside the larger circle.

And I tried to integrate. Clearly I’m a moron. That is so unneccesary.

Consider the triangle formed by the center of the larger circle and the points of intersection of the smaller circle, it has two sides of length R, and one side of length 2r. So we know that the angle formed by the two R sides is 2 x arcsin(r/R). If we multiply the fraction of that angle out of the full circle (360, 2*pi, whatever, take your pick) by the area of the large circle (pi*R^2), you get the area of the wedge, subtract from that the area of the 2r,R,R triangle, (r*sqrt(R^2-r^2)) and you have the area of the circular end of the wedge. Subtract that from half the area of the small circle (pi*r^2/2) and you have the area of the lune. Duh.

Spelled out: pi*r^2/2 – (2*arcsin(r/R)*pi*R^2)/(2*pi) + r*sqrt(R^2-r^2)
or
pi*r^2/2 – arcsin(r/R)*R^2 + r*sqrt(R^2-r^2)

Stupid math problem. Grrr.

recent history

So, what’s been going on the past two weeks. Ugh.

Two tuesday trips to mountainview, one wednesday touring of san francisco, one wednesday meeting of interesting, punk looking guy in berkeley, two thursday trips to the berkeley free clinic for cryosurgery (which seems to have made significant progress, yay!), one thursday trip to Club Faith, two friday partays, of sorts. Much baking of pizzas(interrupted by a power outage, resumed after [eventually] finding the well-concealed circuit breaker) & sunday’s uninterrupted baking of many cookies. Much doing of dishes. One touring of the berkeley hills parks. 0 call backs, 0 interviews, 0 job offers. erk. Must needs be more proactive.

I had a weird dream, about sex, or at least, almost sex, with an lj-er. I didn’t dream about the sex itself. It was all the lead up to it, then cut to me chatting with another lj-er about the cryptic note left by the party in question (apparently the chatting was via telepathy, and note leaver simply vanished, leaving the note behind, welcome to the dreaming). After decyphering effort, it said, in essence, I like you, but I can only have you part time, some of the time and I don’t want that. More stuff happened, but that was the prurient/cerebral part. Weird dream.

Today I have committed myself to going to two temp agencies in downtown berkeley in person. I’m reluctant to do it (otherwise I probably would have done it awhile ago), but the “submitting my resume online” game appears to be a waste of time.

If any of you know of entry level tech training jobs in the bay area, please do let me know.

ughsigh.