Staff Letters: Phil

...Open your heart, I'm beating right here...

So traditionally our letters tend to talk about the previous month - the month that just wrapped up. The October letters being mostly written half way through the month seemed to screw that up a bit, but oh well. Anna in particular wrote a November-y month, but that's OK. I'm going to try to stick mostly to the "here's the previous month with a preview of the upcoming month" formula.

I really cannot believe it's November. That's nuts. It really seems like yesterday I was in my office and got that call from Toby asking if I could meet him early in Detroit. That was in June! Not only is the trip over, but even realizing that, it's almost impossible to believe it's been 3 months since I got back. The semester is almost over, it's really insane!

Halloween. What the fuck? It completely miss-hit... at least around here. I know lots of people around the country that had a stellar Halloween - but pretty much everyone I knew in Southern California had NO plans for Halloween. There were a lot of parties LAST week. Everyone had planned their parties last week so as not to conflict with all of the Halloween parties - but no one made any Halloween parties. Actually I went to a GREAT party last weekend. Anyway, as for this weekend, friday night they all just stayed home and did nothing. Some of them watched the game Saturday... but that's about it. I even had some claim Halloween isn't a real holiday! I had no plans until the last second; a friend I hadn't seen in a long time signed online while I was at work. I asked if he had plans, and (of course) he didn't (as I said, no one in SoCal did), so we grabbed some dinner and then saw Scary Movie 3. After the movie we realized it was.... 8pm. How lame is that? We had finished our plans for the night and it was fucking 8pm. We hung out for a little while and talked and then I went home. Halloween is my favorite holiday - I usually go to Rocky Horror Picture Show, gather with friends and watch movies, or something - but even when I offered to have people over, or go to Rocky - no one wanted to. Lame asses. So it was a very quiet halloween much to my unhappiness.

Speaking of the game - I watched the game. Make that two games. I watched both the USC vs. WSU game as well as the VT vs. Miami game. I'm pretty well known for hating sports, so this was a big step for me. But everyone I know was either watching a game or at a game. So I felt left out and flipped on the two games. The USC game I wanted to watch for obvious reasons, and the VT game because if they win it helps USC. I watched it on and off for about half of the first quarter and then noticed myself really _watching_ both games. Surprisingly I got really into it. I was stoked when USC or VT would score. Not being a sports guy I tended to enjoy watching the team I liked being on offense rather than defense, but I enjoyed watching either way. VT was fun to watch on defense, because they'd just intercept and get defensive TDs. Both USC and VT kicked their opponents ass' pretty well. USC came in at 43-16 and VT came in at 31-7. Go Trojans! Go Hokies!

On a funny note, while working on my project for class with my two partners, one of my partners wasn't typing very well, and without really thinking about it I said (think Matrix):

Do not try to type correctly with your hands
Simply imagine your hands typing correctly

To which Garrick quickly added:

And you will see it is actually the keyboard typing you

Perhaps it's just because we're all geeks, but we all found that really funny.

Also, I couldn't write this letter without including the Chet and Phil Unified Sports Car and Cockroach Theory. We had a problem with a service at work, and after digging and digging to figure out what was wrong, I finally found something wrong. It was very subtly wrong, but definitely wrong. The strange thing is that it was something that had clearly _always_ been wrong... for approximately 6 years since the service existed. We'd had reports of problems only for about 2 weeks. Without going into the problem - it was one such that we should have had about a 15% failure rate - something that would have caused mass chaos. It made no sense that it ever worked so well as to stay under radar. While discussing this Chet and I came up with an analogy. The conversation went something like:

It's like we've been driving this sports car, but for 6 years we never noticed there wasn't a 2nd gear. We'd been going: One... THREE all this time, and never noticed. How could we not notice? It's as if there was something - something else - which had made it "OK" that we were missing 2nd gear. We don't know what that something is, but clearly there was something that made this problem OK for so long. In fact, we'd upgraded certain unrelated parts of this service recently which is more-or-less akin to upgrading the steering column. A new steering column would never make you all of a sudden notice "Oh wow, I don't have a 2nd gear!" So it's as if there was some... petrified cockroach stuck in the engine were 2nd gear SHOULD have been! This petrified cockroach had acted like a 2nd gear all this time. Then when the mechanic installed the new steering column he had accidentally knocked the petrified cockroach loose and noticed "Oh crap! This car doesn't have a second gear!" We must find the cockroach!

So that's the Chet and Phil Unified Sports car and Cockroach Theory. Again, perhaps you need to be a geek, I dunno, but we found it really funny.

November will be a busy month for me. I have the SCALE II conference, I'm going to the AMAs, and I have to prepare for a talk I'm giving the first week in December. I'll report on that next month.

Happy Halloween everyone, see you in December...
Phil

GOOD

St. Anger
40/40 on second project!
Getting to see an old friend before he moves
USC kicking ass in football
Still getting to the gym regularly

BAD

Halloween 2003

BABES OF THE MONTH

Ashley Williams
Constance Zimmer
Tiffani Amber Thiessen
Rachel in vinyl (gah!)

MOVIES I SAW

Scary Movie 2003

MOVIES I WANT TO SEE

Matrix Revolutions
Intolerable Cruelty
Underworld
School of Rock

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