There is a saying that men and women can't be real friends without
getting over the sexual tension that inevitably occurs at some point
in the relationship. A man and a woman may start out as friends but if
they spend enough time together one will fall for the other of maybe
they'll both fall fir each other at the same time and it will all work
out.

Anyway, this saying is one I do agree with. But is it better for
the tension to come at the very beginning or somewhere in the middle,
once you've each developed a good but of trust in each other? On one
hand, it's good to get the whole dating idea out of the system right
away and a romantic attraction surely implies some sort of friendly
attraction but you may be afraid to even try being friends. On the
other hand, if it gets ugly, you're more likely to be friends
afterward if you were friends for a long time before. But, you could
be afraid to try to go back to being friends because that led to the
sexual tension that turned out yo not be good and a repeat of that
surely wouldn't be good.

Why is this even on my mind today? There's no woman in my life, not
even any potential, and I am totally happy with that. Temporarily.
Sent from my iPhone

Google Searches

I have done 15336 google searches since January 2007. At least that’s how many searches I’ve performed while logged into to google, which is almost all the time. That roughly equates to 13 searches per day. Does that sound about right to you? I would have guessed it to be higher than that. I found these statistics that google has kept of me to be rather interesting.

Breaking it down by day, I have googled more on Monday than any other day, at just over 3000. There is a steady decline in my google searches until it hits bottom on Saturday, which nets only about 1100 google searches, which I am glad is the lowest. Saturday I should be out doing cool things that don’t involve google. Sunday it goes back up to about 1700.

Breaking it down by hour, I google most in the 8 and 9am and between noon and 1pm, each with 7.8% of my totalsearches. I guess those are the times shortly after I get to work and during lunch. 1am to 8am is really low – none of those hours include more than 1% of my searches. The rest of the day is relatively flat around 5% to 6% except the 6pm and 7pm hours, when it dips down to 3% per hour.

The sites I click to the most are: Wikipedia, Google Maps, and A-Z Lyrics. Hmm.

Accept/Submit

Every other Wednesday when I log in to view my pay stub, I get annoyed by the little button that you click when you enter your password. It says Accept/Submit. First of all, they make you type in your password by clicking on a virtual keyboard, but it's not just any keyboard. The keys are in a different place on the keyboard each time you open the page so you can't get in any kind of routine about typing in your password. Anyway, have any of you ever seen the words accept and submit used as synonyms.

Accept: to receive with approval or favor; to undertake the duty/resonsibility of; to answer affirmatively; to understand as having a specific meaning; to acknowledge; to regard as normal, suitable, or usual.

Submit: to give over or yield to the power of authority of another; to present for the approval, consideration or decision of others; to offer as proposition or contention.

I suppose I can kind of see how some definitions of accept might fit in with entering a password into a computer, mainly the definition "toacknowledge." But, really, aren't accept and submit kind of opposites? Accept is more of a receiving thing. Someone else does or says something and you pass judgment on whether it is true or valid - the acceptor is the one giving the approval. Submit is a giving thing. Someone else is the judge of whether something is valid or true. The submitter is the one giving someone else something to approve.

Step one in accomplishing anything is having a goal

We recently had a meeting regarding our individual career progression. The discussion started out trying to determine if we are getting adequate feedback on our performance and progress and whether our mentors and supervisors are helping us make progress.

Apparently we all have different ideas of what progress means. By and large, people associated progress with more money and promotions. I suppose that is the idea most people have when you talk about making progress career-wise, but the fact is, many if not most engineers will not be promoted beyond a journeyman engineer (where I currently am) because basically the only promotions available are to management positions.

So we had to take another step back and define what progress is. In the scope of the work we do in our current office, it is clearly becoming more knowledgeable of the system and getting the technical work done more efficiently. But in the broader scope of things, progress could mean many different things. For some, that is all the progress that they desire – being content with the current situation and just becoming more proficient. For others, progress might be gaining a management position or a project lead or becoming the technical lead on something. For others, progress might be getting a graduate degree, and for others progress might be finding a new engineering job, and still for others it may be finding a new career that is more interesting.

So we had to take another step back to define what our goals are because we can’t measure progress unless we have a goal in mind. At this point we realized that many of us don’t have clear goals and therefore cannot accurately measure progress.

So we had to take one more step back and see if we can help each other, along with our first level supervisor, determine our goals. Do you know what your goals are? Are you actively working toward them? Or are you mindlessly going through the motions without much idea for what you want out of your career? This all in terms of careers but the same thing can be said for personal/life goals. Hopefully there is some but not too much overlap between career and personal goals.

Gatlinburg

Last week was the annual bridge tournament in Gatlinburg, probably the most dense gathering of bridge players in the world. It's not a world championship or even a national championship - just a regional - but 4000 bridge players in that small tourist town is a lot. I never really understood why people like going there for the bridge tournament. It's hard to get to. If you drive, there are all those mountain roads you have to take, at least if you're coming from the south, and if you fly, there's no major airport within an hour and no major public transportation to get there. Gatlinburg is, however, one of the southerner's favorite places to go for a mountain vacation - to hide away in a quaint village lined with junk stores, to enjoy the smoky mountain national park, even ski or hike a little bit. It's nothing like a ski village in the Rockies or the Alps but I suppose for people living in the south, it's good.

But why does it attract twice as many bridge players as any other regional bridge tournament in the US. It's not like bridge players get out and enjoy the scenery much. As a whole, they are a very sedentary bunch. At about 40% the size of the Gatlinburg tournament are the next largest regional tournaments in Atlanta, Hilton Head, and Las Vegas. I can understand Vegas - it's a card player's and gambler's heaven, two categories bridge players fit right in with. Atlanta - well, they have a very strong bridge community and the tournament is one of the cheapest and easiest to get to even sans car.

The decision to go to back to school and possibly return to the days of room-sharing and eating ramen noodles or continue a job that may no longer be as exciting and thrilling as it once was is a dilemma lots of smart people face. How do we decide? Why can't there be some sort of guarantee that we'll be more satisfied with life if we change our lifestyle?

How can we tell if we really want a long term change or just a sabattical to allow us to explore some other interests for a few months? I think I'm not ready to completely give up my WR life but I am so  ready to try a radically different lifestyle for more than just a week or two vacation. i'd want it to be something along the lines of a  professional internship or contract job for 4 or 5 months in montreal or some other place but opportunities like that are hard to find, if possible at all. Then I could comeback here for awhile and then later maybe make a permanent change if I liked the temporary job. Eh. Or maybe a 1 year leave without pay while I get a graduate diploma in journalism from Concordia sounds fun... Or alternate semesters working here and studying for a master's in EE at concordia or mcgill. I wonder if that situation would be acceptable to my boss. Hmm.

Hurt Feelings Report

Have your feelings been hurt lately? Fill this out and submit it to your first level supervisor or best friend or colleague or even the person responsible for your hurt feelings, and maybe it'll make you feel better. Or maybe just fill it out and put it in your filing cabinet so you can laugh about it a few years from now. I don't know if this is an actual army form or not - I guess it's not but I wouldn't put it past the Army to have something like this. Anyway, I stumbled across this the other day and found it quite amusing. Here's an example of how to fill it out and a blank one in case you want to fill one out too!