Book meme

I got tagged by Matt for the book meme. It's kind of silly, but I so seldom participate in these kinds of things, and out of respect for my friendship with Matt, I'll play along.

Here are the rules:

1. Find the book closest to you with at least 123 pages.
2. Turn to page 123
3. Find the fifth sentence
4. Post the next three sentences
5. Pass it on.

I'm warning you in advance that I'm breaking rule 5, but if people want to play along, feel free to be my guest.

The nearest book: Tcl and the Tk Toolkit by John K. Ousterhout

If any other completion code occurs, do simply reflects that exception back to its caller.

When do reflects an error upward, it uses the -errorinfo option to return to make sure that a proper stack trace is available after the error. If that option were omitted, a fresh stack trace would be generated starting with do's error return; the stack trace would not indicate where in body the error occurred.

That was, uh, interesting? Revealing, perhaps. That's what you get when you compute in your home office full of tech books. Unfortunately, the massage therapy books were on the other side of the bookshelf.

Perhaps, what this exercise was shooting for was the book I'm currently reading/referencing right now: Run Less, Run Faster, which I mentioned in my previous post. (and will likely mention in my next post.) In THAT book, we get:

This cycle must be carefully structured so that the overload does not exhaust or injure. The recovery must be sufficient to permit the next overload workout.

Finding the appropriate balance of overload and recovery is essential for improvement.

Why don't you just tell me the last junk reading you did? And maybe the last movie you watched? You know -- brain candy.

Reading: Flight 4 a collection of short comics by different artists. Beautiful, interesting, thoughtful, often funny and great for today's short attention span.
Watching: The Frighteners Actually, pretty darned good, if you asked me. Although I guess you didn't.

Four Things

Still sick. But I got this meme through email from some friends and I figured I'd post it here, since I saw it floating around the interwebs/blogosphere a few months ago.

Four jobs I have had in my life:

1. The fry-guy at Carl's Jr restaurant. That job lasted all of two weeks -- couldn't get the smell of grease off my skin for days.
2. accounting department at an insurance company
3. convenience store lackey -- manned the register, restocked the shelves and coolers and made sandwiches. Regret selling beer to the dick/jock with the real, but not his, ID (I recognized him from the paper -- he was a sophomore on the football team) and not selling to the cute girls with the obvious fake ID
4. school computer room PTOP. (Part-time operator) Not particularly technical -- we just checked people in and out for the most part. But it did get you the chance to stay there after hours to get your homework/projects done when everyone else got booted.

Four places I have lived:

1. Sherman Oaks, CA
2. Ithaca, NY
3. Acton, MA
4. Newton, MA

Four places I have been on vacation:

1. London
2. Shanghai
3. Ambergris Caye, Belize
4. Hawaii

Four favorite foods:

1. Noodle Soups (Spicy Beef Noodle Soup, Jambong -- a spicy Chinese/Korean seafood noodle soup, Pho -- vietnamese beef noodle soup, ramen, saimin...)
2. Clearly fried Shrimp
3. Mac 'n Franks (powdered mac 'n cheese variety)
4. Ice Cream (generally in a banana split with hot fudge configuration)

Four places I would rather be right now:

1. Hawaii, surfing
2. Hawaii, hiking
3. Hawaii, snorkeling
4. Hawaii, not being sick.

Kinda got Hawaii on the brain right now. Can you tell?

Four friends or relatives I think will respond first:

1. ...
2. ...
3. ...
4. ...

...which where we end, since I'm not particularly bloggily-connected and those that I do know have probably already played this game.

Back to bed, I think. Or maybe to the kitchen for some more chicken soup.

Jumping back in; 5 Things

Well, school's done. We only have graduation left this coming Sunday and that'll be it. I'm going to have to spend some time reflecting on what I'm really going to do next -- plenty of half-formed plans that I've tossed around, but I need to give things a chance to sink and settle in.

Of course, there's no shortage of things to do right now. Things are finally getting under control with the new house -- I don't even want to go into the saga involved with hiring people to refinish the floors on the first floor except to say that it was scheduled to be finished in the middle of January and we just had our last interaction with the contractor this morning. We still need to pack and move. And we've really kind of dropped the ball on that whole wedding planning thing... I think we were supposed to send out save the dates about two months ago. We still need to meet with caterers, find hotels for guests, invitations, flowers, photographer? honeymoon?

I finally got around to dealing with some mail that was lying around and as I looked more closely at my National Geographic renewal, I wasn't quite getting what it was saying about getting the January issue or the next issue until it finally dawned on me and my brain was like, HOW THE HELL IS IT ALREADY FEBRUARY?! It's like I completely missed January.

Anyway, my friend Leah tagged me with a meme, like, a million years ago, so I figured this might be a good time to have at it. It's called "5 things you might not know about me." And, of course, the problem that most people experience with this exercise is trying to figure out what people don't already know. People either already knew me before they started reading this here blog (hello, Dr.J) or things are fairly self-evident simply from what I've already written, even if I haven't stated them explicitly. (Hey, did you know I'm a bit insecure? Wow, really?) And then the big challenge: the SOOTTAD has instilled in me a great distrust of putting out too much personal information out on the interwebs, so I have to balance telling you about me, without, y'know, really telling you about me. And more importantly, without outting the SOOTTAD.

So anyway, all that has probably made this exercise more of a challenge that it's probably supposed to be, but hey, I have a history of overthinking problems, so it's really just par for the course.

Ok, here we go:

1. After a shower, I always swipe off as much water as possible with my hands before towelling dry. I'm pretty sure I didn't away do this, but I haven't a clue when I started. I think I'm trying to make the towel have to do less work.
2. In high school, I was the fry guy at the local Carl's Jr restaurant. I worked 3 hours a day (the lunch rush) and the moment my shift ended, I would drive home, strip off my brown polyester uniform and take a shower to try and wash the smell of grease off of my body. I don't think I swiped off back then. That job lasted about 2 weeks, and is the only time I ever worked in food service.
3. I have the (unfortunate) habit of singing when I play certain songs on the piano (and guitar). The repertoire has dwindled somewhat over the years, but I'm still left with a handful of songs, including one or two by Billy Joel.
4. I started using stippling as a drawing technique because it was easier to cover up mistakes. While it's not always an optimal form for creating certain textures, (wavy hair comes to mind, actually, all hair) for the most part I think it's generally easier to render recognizable images because it lets a viewer's brain do more of the work. It's sort of like the way we see specific shapes in clouds -- your brain trying to organize information into identifiable patterns -- and sort of how it's hard to draw clouds that look like specific things while still looking like clouds and not a drawing of those specific things.
5. Despite the aforementioned issues surrounding the publishing of ever more personal information on the web, I do have profiles on several social networking sites, including MySpace. But for the very same reason, my MySpace page currently has 0 friends.

That last one seemed kind of lame, but I'm kind of at a loss for anything else. I mean, you all know that I was divorced, right?

I'm not so much for the meme-tagging, which is probably best since there are only a handful of my peeps that actually do this blogging thing. (and there's that intrinsic Ponziness to it that does kind of bother me) But I will send an optional tag to the SOOTTAD, just in case she wants to participate. Despite feeling strongly against posting personally identifying information, she's mentioned that she's felt sad about being left out of the meme game by some of her food blogging peeps in the past.