Monday, 13 February 2012

Most of the time, this blog lives in the present. Sometimes, it lives in the past. But today, let’s go boldly (see how I didn’t split the infinitive there?) to the future.

Next week, Toastmasters is holding a speech-a-thon, They’ve held them before, but the idea to have this particular one was my idea. So, last week, when the sign-up sheet went around, I felt I would’ve been remiss had I not signed up for a speech.

Actually delivering the speeches isn’t a problem. And, in general, concocting ideas for speeches isn’t difficult for me, either. In fact, I have probably ten ideas for speeches just floating around in my head right now, all ready to go for when an appropriate opportunity arises.

The problem, for me, is when I can’t seem to figure out a what to do for a given assignment.

My next speech is my ninth one in Toastmasters. That means I’m working on “Persuade Your Audience.” Here are some details from the Competent Communicator handbook:

1. Persuade listeners to adopt your viewpoint or ideas or to take some action.
2. Appeal to the audience’s interests.
3. Use logic and emotion to support your position.
4. Avoid using notes.

The general types of persuasion are: Inspire, Convince and Call them to action.

So here’s the help I need: WHAT SHOULD I TALK ABOUT?

I’ve only got nine days here, and I usually start working on the speech by now. It’s supposed to be 5-7 minutes in length. I don’t want to talk about anything too controversial, or too banal. Since I don’t have too much time, I can’t go into depth will all sorts of reasons why or why not someone should do something.

Discussing vegetarianism is quite a good idea. But a fellow club member just gave an excellent speech on such a subject. And, since I’m not technically a vegetarian, there’d be a bit of hypocrisy I wouldn’t be comfortable with.

Any ideas?

Saturday, 11 February 2012

I spent a good chunk of the day at the Water Park of America.

This is not the sort of place that I usually attend. But it was my son’s friend’s birthday and, well, his parents decided to celebrate at the water park.

And I’m glad I went, too. I always feel intimidated by those big tourist attractions – what with their overwhelming size and ability to extract exorbitant fees from my wallet. Actually, my current employer has been great in this regard – for department outings, I have frequently been treated to fun activities around the metro area. This has given me some exposure to these events, and made them seem less foreboding. For example, I probably would have lived my whole life without going to a Saints game, but thanks to my employer, I’ve been to two. Same goes for a boat tour on Lake Minnetonka, a day at Pinstripes, and a Timberwolves game. Even if I do try something outside my element, I insist on doing so during a downtime. Like when we visited the Foshay Tower, we did so on a Wednesday afternoon. My first trip to Underwater World was on a Tuesday at about 10:00 in the morning.

So, today, I was at the Water Park. I gotta give it two thumbs up. There was plenty to do and, even though it’s a Saturday. In the few hours I was actually in the water (and even though I was watching Isla for half the time), I was able to ride the Lazy River, play with Owen in the kids’ area, and go down the water slides – even the gigantic 10-story slide.

Best of all, the birthday celebration is a sleep-over for the birthday boy, so Owen, as one of his friends, gets to spend the night at the hotel and get in some more swim time tomorrow afternoon.

Sunday, 12 February 2012

Today, even though I could have used the time to sleep in (see above: I was tired), I showed up at AM950’s station in Eden Prairie. The plan was that I would be conducting an interview on Atheists Talk, live from 9:00 – 10:00 this morning.

I conducted the interview once before, as you may recall, back in December, I interviewed Glenn Kleier, author of The Knowledge of Good and Evil. I was nervous to be live on the radio, but I didn’t totally suck at it, so about a month ago, I contacted the show’s producers again and said, “Hey, here’s another author you should interview. I read his book and loved it. I’m willing to conduct the interview, if you’d like.”

The book I was talking about was The Matter With Us, by John Rawles.

Well, today, I was supposed to interview Dr. Rawles but, as you can likely surmise from my word choice here, it didn’t happen.

There was trouble making the connection to Dr. Rawles, who lives in the Olde Country. I think the specifics of the trouble would be boring, so I won’t detail them here. But I was sitting in the studio, with papers on table and headphones in hand, chatting with the host. I looked up at the clock and, noticing it was 9:01, I leaned back and called out into the control room, “Are you guys having trouble getting a hold of John?”

Indeed, they were.

They had the good thought to play more of the commercials up front (normally they’re scattered throughout the show) in an effort to buy time. When the commercials ran out, they began playing a show from a few months ago. They said we could break into the show once we got a hold of John. I didn’t like that idea, but it wasn’t up to me.

Finally at about 9:12, John was on the line. The host, however, insister this was too late to begin the show.

I guess they’re gonna reschedule. I was pretty annoyed – having waken up, driven across town, and prepared an hour long interview. Also, whenever I do activities like this, I try to bring Owen with me as much as possible so that my wife isn’t back home with both kids (like she often is). So this morning was perfect, since Owen was at the above mentioned sleep-over.

Anyway, I’m glad they’re rescheduling. Dr. Rawles and I put a lot of work into planning this interview. Also, he wrote an amazing book and it deserves as wide exposure as possible.

 

 

 

The Olde Country

 

Friday, 10 February 2012

A few weeks ago, they (sorry, I don’t know why “they” are) installed a very cool map of the world on the wall at my job. The wall itself is painted deep blue and the land masses are all a raised, shiny metal. There are no features on the map apart from the land masses – no political divisions, no indication of terrain, no markings to show “you are here.” I walked past them (sorry, I don’t know who “them” is) a few times on the day of installation, and I was almost jealous of their job. They had all these pieces of the world scattered on the floor, and they affixed a paper tracing of the world onto the relevant wall. Then, as they day progressed, the installed the land masses one-by-one, careful to place each one where the tracing indicated. One of the workers cut out the paper map as the metal one was installed, thereby revealing the blue “ocean” background.

I am unnecessarily picky about the maps I like. In fact, though I am a map-lover, it’s probably a good policy to never purchase a map, globe, or atlas as a gift for me because I will almost certainly be disappointed.

I give the map installed at work a solid B.

For one thing, it’s not Mercator’s Projection, and I loathe Mercator’s Projection. It’s not a Goode Homolosine, either, which is better, but bugs the crap out of me. I believe it’s an Equirectangular  (albeit sans Antarctica) – and that, inmy opinion, is on e of the four or five best projetions out there.

But there’s a problem (besides the absense of Adrian Veidt’s home continent). The problem is…There’s complete disregard for land masses smaller than 10,000 square kilometers (almost). I noticed right away that many island chains were not represented and I determined that, one day, I would figure out the minimum limitation.

Today, I figured it out: Jamaica is the smallest island nation depicted on the map. At 10,991 square km, Jamaica just makes the cut for “big enough to count.” But there area few other islands on the map that are smaller than Jamaica. One of them is Puerto Rico, which is only 8,870 square km. Another is Prince Edward Island, at 5,684 square km. Why are these included, I wondered, and not Cyprus? Cyprus, after all, weighs in at 9,251 square km, so it’s bigger than both Puerto Rico and Prince Edward Island. But maybe (and I think this really is why) the designers felt that leaving off PR and PEI would be immediately spotted by their American and Canadian clientels. This would also explain the map’s biggest grievence – Hawaii is on the map…but only the Big Island. So, for one thing, it looks weird. I mean, if you’re gonna show Hawaii, you’ve at least got to show five or six of the main islands (you know, like Maui, O’ahu, and Kaua’i) in order for the representation to look like the State of Hawaii. The one islands, all by itself, just doesn’t look right.

I saw someone staring at the map the other day, so I stopped and stared with her. She put her finger right on the Big Island and said, “What’s this?” I said, “It’s Hawaii, minus about 130 of its islands.” She smiled at me like I was a dork.

 Try picturing this with only the Big Island. Doesn’t look like Hawaii anymore, does it?

Second, even that Big Island is only a measely 4,028 square miles – far smaller than many other islands that are not depicted at all. So why even bother? Again, it’s got to be because, as Americans, we damn well want to see all of our fifty states. And that Spanish stepchild.

So, I’m sure you’re now wondering: what nations are not given any land mass representaion at all? Well, Cyprus is the largest.  The others, in descending order of size, are…

The Bahamas (at 13,000+ sq km, the Bahamas is larger than Jamaica. Alas, none of its 700 islands are larger than 6,000 sq km)

Trinidad and Tobago

Cape Verde

Samoa

Mauritius

Comoros

Sao Tome and Principe

Kiribati

Bahrain

Dominica

Tonga

Singapore (maybe – thanks to The Causeway I’m not sure if it’s an island or not anymore)

Micronesia

St. Lucia

Palau

Seychelles

Antigua and Barbuda

Barbados

St. Vincent and the Grenadines

Grenada

Malta

The Maldives

St. Kitts and Nevis

The Marshall Islands

Nauru

I’m thinking of drawing them in myself. But I don’t think my free-hand pencil would blend in with the die-cut metal.

Wednesday, 08 February 2012

So…Two events happened in my life in the last 24 hours that are both, well, weird.

First: Yesterday, in class, the professor asked for thoughts on a certain chapter we were assigned to read. I raised my hand. This was about an hour into the class, and I – as always – was an active participant during that whole hour. The professor scanned the room and said, “Okay, I’m looking for someone beside James.” A couple students looked at me, as if to say, “That’s weird.” Later during the class period, the professor said something similar.

Then, today, I attended the biweekly Toastmasters meeting. During Table Topics, which is the portion of the meeting dedicated to extemporaneous speaking, the Table Topics Master called upon me to come up an deliver an impromptu speech. So I did. A few minutes later, when it was time to evaluate the main speeches, I got up and evaluated the first speech, since, after all, that was my job at today’s meeting. Then, when a fellow club member got up to evaluate speech #2, he began by saying that he wished he didn’t have to follow me.

About five minutes later, the Grammarian got up to deliver their report and, after citing some of the “ums” and “ahs” that other speakers said during their speeches, she looked back down at her notes and said, “I’m not even going to talk about you James, because you’re in a league of your own.”

Huh.

This is weird stuff to me. At both school and work, I feel much like a junior to many of my peers. This “junior” feeling is not based on chronology (because, after all, I’m not the youngest in any situation at school or work), but on ability, experience, and training. So…it’s kind of weird to be singled out as exceptional like this. And it’s not just a case of “good job, James, you get an A on this assignment” or “James, I enjoyed your speech today.” No, instead, it’s a case of, “The normal metrics we use to gauge our progress do not apply to you.”

So, I suppose they are compliments. But these occurrences are also weird (are you sick of me using the word “weird” yet? I know I am). In class yesterday, for example, how do I react or respond to the professor’s comment? On the one hand, I guess I’m on track to get an A in the participation portion of the class, but on the other hand, i’m being silenced for having already said too much. Would it be better if the professor just paused for a few seconds to see if other hands go up? Or maybe she just meant it as a joke – “James, you raise your hand all the time and, thank you for that, but I need to get these other students to share their opinions, too.” And in Toastmasters today, a co-worker joined me as a guest today, and it was kind of embarrassing to be singled out like that. Both times, my co-worker nodded at me as if to say, “Well, I guess you have quite a reputation here.”

Anyway, I don’t know what to say. I just think it’s weird. You probably think I just sound extremely cocky right now, which, I’m sure, confirms your suspicions.

Thursday, 09 February 2012

 Here are some recent photos:

Look at all the nerds I live with! I snapped this photo over the weekend.Guess what they’re watching? A vintage Sesame Street YouTube video? A music video from children’s troubadour Raffi? Some cute kid video that was spammed to us? No, no, and no. They’re watching a video on the evolutionary development of life on Earth over the past billion years. Like I said, NERDS!

My wife took this picture earlier this week:

That’s my daughter wearing Jennifer’s glasses. She’s not allowed to play with them since, you know, 18 month-olds are prone to destroy eyewear. But, in the bustle of the morning, Isla clandestinely absconded with the. Sorry if this exceeds your RDC* limit.

 Today we attend a Physics Force presentation at the Minneapolis Convention Center. It was similar to the program Owen and I attended in November. In fact, I would say there was about a 1/3 overlap between the two events (both presentations were put on by the same people). But today’s presentation was longer, louder, and more engaging. Owen thoroughly enjoyed it. He laughed at the corny jokes and he even got a thrill out of the metal drum that collapses under air pressure. This gives off a loud boom that, in November, scared him. But today he was expecting the loud boom, and even prepped my wife for what was aobut to happen.

Here’s a picture of him in front of the stage:

Do you see how thrilled he is?

*Recommended Daily Cuteness

Sunday, 05 February 2012

Today we tried to watch the Super Bowl. My wife even prepared chili in our crockpot. Unfortunately, we discovered the Big Game was set to air on NBC. Around here, that’s channel 11.

We don’t get channel 11.

Not sure why, but our antenna does not pick it up at all. This is another example of technology regressing: if TV was still broadcast analog, we would have been able to pick up something, even if it wasn’t very good. But, no, thanks to digital, all we had was a black screen.

“Hey,” you say, “Why don’t you guys get cable?”

“Hey,” I answer, “Because I don’t feel like paying for 20 channels I won’t watch just to get one channel that I intend to tune in once a year.”

My wife tried all sorts of MacGyver maneuvers to get NBC into our home, but nothing worked. We even received an 11th hour invite to a friend’s home, but since we are all quasi-sick (it’s how we spend our Februaries), we decided to stay home.

I discovered that, for the first time ever, the Super Bowl would be streaming online. So I proposed that we set our laptop up in the living room, hook up the speakers, and watch it that way. Yes, that is a small screen, but it’s not like we really care about the Super Bowl.

The first thing we discovered was that the streaming would not work on my laptop; it kept closing my internet browser for no reason. So we used my wife’s computer. However, the external speakers didn’t work on her computer (which is very odd since our headphones work just fine), so she just turned up the volume on her laptop as loud as possible, which still is not loud enough.

Once the Big Game began, we enjoyed our chili, along with barely-audible sound and a constantly freezing stream. When the first commercials commenced, we realized we weren’t watching the Super Bowl commercials, but a crappy trio of commercials designed especially for people watching online:

-A series of commercials featuring Rainn Wilson. I think I saw about ten of these commercials, and I still can’t tell you what they were advertising.

-A series of commercials extolling the wonders of GE. Since NBC is owned by GE (the three notes struck when the NBC logo appears are, fittingly, G, E, and C), this was basically an “aren’t we awesome?” bragfest.

-A series of commercials advertising an upcoming movie titled Act of Valor, which looks like it was paid for by the Department of War Defense. It might be an interesting movie if it didn’t look just like 500 other movies in the budget bin at KMart. I think the plot is something like a hey-look-how-brave-we-are-that-we-got-our-own-men-out-of-a-place-they-shouldn’t-have-been-in-the-first-place kind of thing.

At half time, there was no Madonna, just a black screen with words telling us the program would resume soon.

Maybe it did, maybe it didn’t. We’ll never know. We shut down the laptop and did something far more interesting. We went to sleep.

Online Super Bowl Streaming: F

Monday, 06 February 2012

I dropped off my taxes today.

Yeah, I gotta admit defeat. In 2010, I made a major blunder in doing my taxes; a blunder that would have caught me several hundred dollars had a friend not casually mentioned one item I missed. It took two letters to the always-helpful IRS to get matters straightened out. After that, Jennifer said I should just admit that our lives are too complicated now for me to continue doing our taxes myself.

Problem is, I always hated the idea of having to pay someone else to do my taxes.

In fact, there was only once in my life that a professional did my taxes: in the tax season after I turned 18, I received a coupon from H&R Block saying that they would do my taxes for free. So I stopped in. It took them about ten minutes. Other than that, I have received help from time to time. Another friend (not the same as the one mentioned above) did my taxes for me one year and, for a couple of years, my mother-in-law-to-be did my taxes. But over the years, I kept on top of things just enough to know how to do them. For a time, I was even the go-to guy at work when co-workers had questions about their tax forms.

But after 2010’s blunder, Jennifer strongly suggested we have them prepared professionally.

So, I put the word out, and a co-worker suggested STAT Enterprise in Crystal (and they don’t even appear to have a website, otherwise I’d put a link RIGHT HERE). For about $60, they did my taxes and filed them online.

Today, I dropped my taxes off there again. It’s a little embarrassing to say, “Hey, my life is so complicated, I don’t even understand it anymore” or, perhaps more correctly, “I’m too stupid to do this here cypherin’ correctly,” but what can you do?

Call STAT Enterprise, I guess. No, really, call them: 612-481-3283. Tell them James sent you. That way I’ll get a kickback.

Tuesday, 07 February 2012

Things I did today…

-Dropped off internship papers with my adviser

-Attended class at Hamline

-Put in a 6.5 hour day at work

-Met up with a woman who contacted me on Craig’s List and sold her a lamp

-Returned a set of office chair casters to Office Max

-Sold a shirt and book to Once Upon a Child

-Filled my car’s tank with gasoline

-Faxed in papers to the accountant who is doing our taxes

-Installed a bumper sticker on my car’s trunk

-Signed up to volunteer at St. Paul’s Annual Citywide Clean-up

-Signed up for a health evaluation to take place at work next week

-Signed up to attend Physics Force 2012

-Dined at IKEA, where we serendipitously met up with friends and shared a table with them.

-Obtained the correct office chair caster we needed (also at IKEA)

-Read a chapter out of the book for class

-Watched an episode of Little House on the Prairie

-Updated this blog

-Read two chapters from The Kidnapped King with my son

Yikes, no wonder I’m tired.