When Friday afternoon boredom kicks in at work, then if you're not the only one it's affecting, they might ask you to help them with something... um... only mildly work related?...

They kind of look like election campaign posters. Well anyway, here's a partial screenshot of their home page:



It's been like that all day.

I wasn't actually looking for singles on that particular site, but did click when it came up as a business location when I was Googling Bloomington bars. I'm sick of the ones I keep going to (well Bears is great, but it's not really a singles place... the rest of them suck so far). I'm trying to figure out where I could go either on my own or with my friend and maybe actually be able to run into singles that aren't self-righteous hipsters (Vid), hillbillies (Office Lounge), or babies (Kilroys, Bluebird, and just about everything else that ISN'T one of the first two). A few exceptional places don't count because they're too "restauranty"... you can't really comfortably wander around Bears or the Lion to mingle.

Any suggestions? I've never really spent much time at Farm (but I think it's overpriced) or Finch's. I guess I keep imagining that stereotypical bar that you see on movies, but honestly the closest thing that comes to that in Bloomington seems to be the bar sections of chain restaurants. It's sad to live in a town where the best cafe is Starbucks and the best bar is O'Charlie's.

I finished chapter one of Harry Potter ja Visasten Kivi last weekend and spend a lot of time Monday and a little bit more time Tuesday reading and listening and enjoying the fact that I completely understood what was going on (by the end of Tuesday, even without the help of the text in front of me), and am happy that I was able to listen ahead a little and still follow pretty well, though I'll still need to buckle down and do the vocab if I want to do this the way I said I'm going to do... namely translate everything... maybe it builds character?

I'm pretty excited about this new weekend activity, and look forward to getting the entire book (17 chapters, I think, so 16 more) done by the end of the semester or shortly thereafter. I figure by the time I'm done, my vocabulary will have shot up tremendously and I'll have a pretty good passive understanding, even if I don't get much (or any) speaking practice.

Now I need to get my hands on Russian versions of the text and audio, preferably for #2. (I have #3 in Spanish).

Update
Finished the word lsit for Chapter 2 on schedule, and I'll be reading through it as planned during the week. I think that's becoming my pattern. The weekend gives me several solid hours two days in a row to plow through the list of words that I don't know each time, and then the weekdays that follow give me time here and there to just casually listen again and again until I comfortable understand without the printed text.

So the other day I was thinking to myself how shitty it is that I don't have the time to go study languages of interest over coffee like I used to do a decade ago back in Greensboro. But then, as I started considering my (lack of a) social life here in Bloomington, the relatively easier academic responsibilities that I have, and the relative lack of stress at my (daytime-only, no-overtime) job, I started realizing with some degree of shame that what's really going on is that I don't TAKE the time to do it.

One language that interests me, despite being nearly useless for any real purpose other than just saying I know it, is Finnish... just because at some point years ago I made a Finnish friend, took some interest in it, hung out with other Finns in subsequent years, had a crush on a Finnish girl or three, and ended up taking two years of it at IU when I first came up.

I happen to own a copy of Harry Potter 1 both in book and CD format in Finnish, and even more luckily, they're the same translation, meaning I can read and listen at the same time. So I've started the slow yet (so far... I'm sure I'll tire of it) somewhat enjoyable task of (1) reading and listening to a chapter, (2) translating every single word in the chapter, and then (3) re-listening and re-reading once I know exactly what's going on.

I'm in the middle of the first iteration of step 2: Chapter 1 is taking me days to translate this way. I did 2 pages Thursday, 2 pages last night, 6 pages today, and will do the last 6 pages tomorrow, reserving Monday for a few read-throughs along with the complete vocabulary list until I feel like I can follow along without having to constantly look back at it for reminders.

Right now it's taking me about 30-45 minutes per page to compile and translate the lists of words that I don't know, but that will quickly shorten as words get repetitive. Based on this rate, even though chapters will get longer, I'm hoping to pull off a chapter a week so I can be done by the end of May or so.

The benefit of reading something I'm familiar with is that I can guess a lot more from context without resorting to a dictionary (same reason Calvin and Hobbes is good for short spurts.) But admittedly, after listening to it all in German two or three times each, I'm getting a little burnt out on Harry Potter. I'm willing to tolerate it a bit longer simply for the convenience of familiarity and the fact that I have both audio and print versions of exactly the same text.

Update
I finished Chapter 1 without too much trouble, so one per week is starting to look pretty realistic.

My new resume states, as did my old one, that I have a reading knowledge (I believe originally it said "Familiar/Reading:...") of Spanish, Finnish and Russian, which is true. I don't claim to speak any of them particularly well on a conversational level, though I have had conversations in each of them at times when I might have been more competent (or drunk) in the past. Anyway, I was showing off the resume (for it's technical value, not its content) when someone at work (who is from another country and speaks several languages, including Russian), told me she thought I should remove that. At first I just figured she meant that I shouldn't put languages that I only kind of know on there, as if it's somehow fake (and maybe that's where it originated, and then it just got twisted up as we argued about it)... but when I made that assumption and explained that, since I'd consider taking work either in (or related to) countries that speak any of those languages, and that it made sense to me to point out that I at least have a willingness and competency to quickly refresh my knowledge of those if ever necessary, she kind of changed tracks to suggest that it made me seem "too liberal", and that "most" employers (?) prefer conservative employees. She said that being an American interested in lots of languages made it seem like I was a hippie.

Am I nuts that I found this is a really strange view from ANYone, not to mention someone who comes from an area of the world where they speak lesser-spoken languages? Is it indeed a bad idea to put languages that interest you (and that you're at least halfway legitimately competent in) on a resume if it's of geographic relevance to areas that you might like to work in?

All it really did was make me feel stupid for not knowing them better... particularly when she contrasted it with a hypothetical situation in which being able to claim 'advanced' knowledge of them would change how appropriate it was to mention the interest. Was she just being skeptical about my ability and somehow interpreting my inclusion of these languages as posing, or was this really an assumption/concern that she has about the professionalism of this kind of information on my resume? Of course she claimed the latter... but I find that a hard opinion to believe... should I?

This is the new web version of my resume, and the first step in a web site/service idea. The XML class that I'm taking in SLIS (more for the project that I hope to do for it than for what I think I'll learn in it) will help me flesh out step 2. Then step 3 will involve programming an interface to allow people to edit their resume information (and add custom items/groups) before moving on to step 4... which shall remain a mystery until at least summer.

Josh has a good gripe about "Non-racist Racists", the gist of both his post and my comments about it (in which I agreed) being that we're annoyed by people who complain about racism but express it in other ways that don't seem any more innocuous than the offenses that they complain about. I won't duplicate his points here, or any more of my own comments, but I will go ahead and share a funny link about HP webcam technology...

It apparently can't recognize black faces.

An excerpt from a recent email from me to select people in my office about the ongoing edits to a holiday card we (= I) have been making:



Quite possibly the last response I could have expected to such an email... one that made me both laugh and cry at the same time:



If I had treated this as a power struggle rather than just a failure to read past the first few sentences of my original message, I could have won said struggle pretty easily. I'm the one in control of the web site, and I doubt not making those changes would lose me my job... it's a university job, and firing me takes a lot of work.

Fortunately I'm mature(/sensible?) enough (most of the time) to just bite my tongue, make the edits, and send it along.

Stefan Sagmeister: The Power of Time Off

This may be useful to the small percentage of people who are already independently successful enough to actually stop working for a year without going broke, and it might be mildly interesting to the ones of those who only barely make that much (i.e. might actually benefit from the advice to take a year off to increase their overall earnings by improving creativity), but then again. The intersection of these groups forms an audience subset far too small to justify the slap in the fact that this feels like to the rest of us.

I compare this to a comment that this woman that came to talk to our e-Commerce class made once in SLIS. She laughed about some "ridiculous" flyer she saw in the fine arts building advertising web development for $30/hour in the context of justifying more like $80-100. But what she didn't know was that the person who had posted the flyer (me) was working alone, didn't have to factor in a lawyer or an accountant, and wasn't outsourcing portions of his work to other people or to employees. There was no overhead... just a flat rate that I felt to be fair compensation for my time.

But she was critical of that rate for the same reason that this guy thinks his talk is particularly informative: he thinks that (a) he's in a position that many developers are in, and (b) that he's somehow landed on a concept that is incredibly original.

Guess what? Google gives employees 20% of their time to develop personal projects, and they provide nap and play rooms for burnt-out employees who need some release. IU gives me plenty of free time ON the job and virtually no overtime to cut into my evenings and weekends, and I STILL haven't come up with an idea that's taken my anywhere special. It's not like the world hasn't heard of the concept of relaxation and reflection once in a while to improve the quality of the work you do at a later time. Most people just can't take an entire year off to do it.

Tell you what, Mr. Sagmeister. You fund a year off for me and then I might not think you're quite such a dick. Here's a fucking brilliant idea: go to Starbucks once in a while and brainstorm some ideas while you're still working at other time during the day. Sacrifice a small amount of time while still making enough to afford financial security and stability, and then if you land an awesome idea that you want to develop, THEN dive in and take a risk by leaving your current situation. There. I just gave a "talk" that provides more productive advice than your 17-minute insult to the typical struggling freelancer.

Do I sound a little bitter? Of course I do.

I was recently turned on to a funny Finnish picture site called "kuvaton.com after I saw the photo below: