Posts Tagged ‘advice’

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Hosting for the socially inept

September 23, 2012

I went to two parties yesterday. This is twice my monthly allotment so I’m feeling a little oversocialized. Due to the differences in how the events went, I’d like to take this time to rant about hosting parties where people don’t know each other (especially for the socially inept).

As the host, cooking is not that important. Talking to your BFF is not that important. Fussing with this or that is… let’s see…. not that important. The highest priority of the host should be to pawn the guests off on each other. Given your guest list, you can even think of some of the connections ahead of time.

“Oh, have you met Kershohsdaf? She’s in the same field as you are.”

“Let me introduce you to Uoweirj. He’s interested in the XYZ as you’ve mentioned before.”

If you can make them amuse each other, then you can do all that other stuff without wallflowers growing. Especially for the stand-around-and-chat parties, the host can’t be the center of attention; they’ve got too much to do. Introducing people helps a ton. Another method of clearing the walls is to give shy people jobs so they have a good reason to talk to others.

“What I need you to do is take this to everyone and tell me what they think of it. If they like that, we’ve got more but if they don’t we’ll switch to another bottle.”

“I’m afraid Ldsofai and Jsdfa don’t know anyone here. I know you don’t either but I’m hoping you can introduce them around. They are so shy on their own.”

The best a host can hope for is to make people talk to each other. If the partygoers can find new people to talk to on their own, even better. And as an attendee, you have to be willing to use social ploys to keep thing going so your host doesn’t have to baby you through everything. But for that, do as I say, not as I do.

At the BBQ event yesterday, sponsored by my college alumni association, the host said hello, asked if we enjoyed the aquarium, pointed us to the snacks, and resumed her previous conversation.

I grabbed a water and stood on the periphery of the group near the snacks. Then I got bored (and uncomfortable, like I was eavedropping) and went to look a the pictures C and I had taken before we got there. Then, feeling chilly and sunburned and useless, we left. We didn’t talk to anyone else. I thought it was because everybody else was talking to each other. After we’d left, C pointed out that they were all in groups of two or three so they probably weren’t talking to each other either.

It shouldn’t have been hard to start conversations. Most of the people had been to the Monterey Bay Aquarium that day. Most of the people had all gone to the same college (though not in the same years). Most of the people had science or technology jobs. Some had been whale watching that morning.

Maybe I was already socially feeble from going to the aquarium and interacting with people there. Still, I’m kind of embarrassed that we didn’t talk to anyone. I mean, I did re-load business cards into my wallet in hopes of meeting people. But they were talking to each other. I didn’t want to interrupt.

This is somewhat a couples’ problem. If Jack and Jill come to a party and are too shy to introduce themselves to others, they will talk to each other, thereby making it hard for anyone to come talk to them. It is even worse if one half of the couple is less excited about meeting people.

At the second party, I went solo. I had to interact or look like a complete loser.  My host there was more helpful, spending a little time making me comfortable and then doing the big group name-only introduction (sadly, those don’t tell me who I might be able to chat with). There were lots of other solos there.

Even so, I spent a lot of time in the kitchen refilling the water jug, feeling like an idiot, particularly after I hit shoals in the conversation (Hint: “So, what do you do?” is not always a safe conversation starter. Sigh.)

Fish not swimming together

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Lullaby and good night

August 23, 2012

Someone in the house has insomnia. And it isn’t me. For a change.

Since I stopped trying to run the world more efficiently and focused on trying to make myself happy and productive, I tend not to have insomnia (except for the occasional that-wasn’t-decaf issue). However, C’s gotten into the vicious cycle of waking up a few times a night, getting annoyed/anxious, and then repeating the next night, now even more sleep deprived.

I have to admit, I’m getting a little tired too.

When I was little and had trouble going to sleep (always Sunday nights, even today it is Sunday nights that are the hardest), my mom tried to tell me that there was a spell for going to sleep, just like the spells we’d read about in Witch World and Xanth books. She said that I had to concentrate for the spell to work.

First, I had to find a comfortable position, so comfortable that I could take ten deep breaths without wiggling (in fact, if I wiggled at all, I had to start the whole spell over again).

Next, there was a song I had to recite in my head, taking the same breaths I’d take if I was singing it very slowly, like chanting it. The song:

Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are,
Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky.
Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are,
You’ll be sparkling through the night, I’ll be snuggled up so tight.
While you’re smiling at moonbeams, I will see you in my dreams.
Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are,
Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky.
When the light of day is near, you just seem to disappear.
Why do you hide and where do you go? There’s so much that I don’t know.
Twinkle, twinkle little star, how I wonder what you are,
Up above the world so high, like a diamond in the sky.

Ok, that isn’t the song. I forgot the song long ago. But that is the song from the Soother I worked on at LeapFrog and it is the song I mentally sing to myself now. Though there are a few other songs too. And poems.

Anyway, back to the spell: concentrating on a song, remembering it is a good way to fall asleep. It is hard to worry about all the things I worry about and think about breathing and remember a song.

But wait, there is more to the spell after the song. If you are still awake. I don’t remember what it was… maybe think of ten things… For example, think of ten red things or ten things that puppies play with. No wiggling. This is all mental.

Ten is a funny number. Most brains hold six items easily. Ten is harder, especially when you are sleepy. This definitely drives out all the other things to stay awake to think about.

Sometimes I change this up and multiply 2 x 2 x … 2 x 2 until I get to a new number, ideally not just through my arithmetic errors. Bonus points if I can simultaneously count how many twos this is (as in the N in 2^N).

Still awake? That isn’t so good. You can do this spell three times, switching out poems and mental exercises (or not). But if you are still awake after the third time, just get up. Sit quietly and accept that sleep isn’t going to happen. Maybe get a drink or a snack but don’t force it. Read a book, listen to music. Just don’t try to sleep for an hour.

Finally, not every spell works for everyone every time.

But this one worked pretty well for me.

Sweet dreams.

 

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I will name him George

May 15, 2012

I think I mentioned that we rented the car we drove. We put 7102 miles on the car (it started at 7686 on the odometer).

The car was a new Mazda CX-9, silver with black leather seats but no backup camera. It was a solid power-wise (300 horsepower) and seats for 8.

It was a really good car. Trustworthy and valiant. We should have at least changed the oil. Thought, when we checked (in North Dakota, I think), the oil looked great, like brand new.

We gave it back to Alamo today. I’m a little sad. It was a good car. They said nothing about the bug encrusted front half of the car. Just gave us a receipt for a little under $800. 23 days and 7k miles. (What a great deal!)

And for the record, we told everyone we talked to at Alamo what we intended to do with the car. The checkout person didn’t care, the car wrangler thought it was awesome and might possibly have saved a Mazda for us (over a Ford Flex or a Jeep Grand Cherokee), the map person was appalled but only at the thought of driving all that way. The checkin was painless.

The last gas up was for 14.1 gallons (probably, no receipt for this one) and 307.8 miles. Better than 20mpg.

I’ll miss George.

20120515-120736.jpg

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Time flies like a banana

May 3, 2012

As we traveled east, many of the gadgets have not done well with the time change. The iPhone, teacher’s pet that it is, offers a near perfect user experience. As we crossed the time zones, the iPhone continues to display local time whatever that is.

For something so seemingly easy, that is incredibly difficult. None of the other gadgets come close.

The iPhone has four sources of time, let’s go through them and work through why the other gadgets don’t work as well. First, the phone, like many gadgets, has a clock. This is a crystal that counts how many ticks since it was booted. The ticks could be from a  32.768kHz crystal (a real-time-clock or RTC component that keeps a slow-for-a-computer heartbeat). Like any watch, all you need to do it tell it what local time is, and the RTC (or other crystal) maintains it. However, it will drift off from the correct time (particularly if it stays in a hot car for a long time or in a particularly cold room). So when your 1984 Star Wars watch would lose a couple minutes a month, that is why. The clock counts ticks from when you set it but if the ticks are off by 0.01%, you end up losing a minute a week.  Temperature extremes makes this worse.

Ok, so that is old, old method for doing it. But if you have nothing else, a gadget with a crystal will keep time reasonably well. Though, it can’t tell if you’ve crossed timezones. That is why we had to reset the car’s digital clock every day or two.

The iPhone also has a GPS which isn’t only for location. GPS provides very accurate time information. However, the time is not local time but UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) which, for this purpose, is the same as GMT (Greenwich Mean Time, from when Greenwich, England was the center of the world). In California, we were GMT-8. Well, sometimes; California has daylight savings time so the offset shifts depending on the season.

This is (nominally) to reduce energy consumption as people tend to be clock based. The time shifts so the bulk of the daylight is after people wakeup. Sunlight at 4am in’t that useful but by shifting the clock, that sunlight moves to 5am and the evening light moves from 7pm to 8pm, a reasonably big win for folks stuck in 9-5 jobs.

Gadgets hate daylight savings time. Well, the programmers of gadgets hate DST.  Not everywhere in the US has daylight savings time (ahem, Arizona!). So now, a gadget using GPS time needs to know how to map from location to time and whether that place uses daylight savings time. It also needs to know when DST begins and ends, which can change (thank you, President Bush), causing devices that you (the customer) end up having to change 4 times every year (correct DST, gadget’s faux correction; forward and back). Oh, but there are some counties in the US that vote on whether to do DST each year so it isn’t enough to just use the current protocol.

GPS provides a signal that is both good and bad: it is very accurate (the gadget can know how long a second is to nanosecond precision) but not very precise (the gadget can be hours off of local time but it would always know what time it is in Greenwich (gee, thanks, England!)). Since it is very accurate, I’ve used it in devices to time how long something took, was it 0.00011 seconds since the system heard a gunshot or 0.00013 seconds? As a stopwatch, the GPS clock is fantastic.

A GPS can also be used to keep a a crystal real time clock accurate. Every time GPS updates the time (every second), the gadget (microprocessor) counts how many ticks the RTC had. Now, it can predict for the next second how many ticks there will be (the drift associated with the crystal is relatively slow so this works well).

The user still has to set the time. And reset the time for daylight savings time. And change the time when the user moves to a new timezone. The GPS gave us accuracy but didn’t solve any of the other problems.

Ok, so the iPhone also has WiFi which can help with some of these. It can use the internet to contact a mainframe server and ask, “what time is it?” The gadget doesn’t really need a GPS for accuracy, it can use the standard servers and Network Time Protocol (NTP) to get accurate timing information (or Simple Network Time Protocol to get reasonably accurate time information). Unfortunately, this is UTC as well so it has all the disadvantages of GPS: it has to ask the user for their offset (usually they ask you to select a nearby city and the gadget figures it out; and all of the daylight savings time complexity). NTP is a general internet service, available using different servers. A gadget manufacturer can instead have the gadget call home to their own server which can provide more information than just NTP.

However, if the gadget has WiFi and GPS, it can contact a server with a query that essentially says, “I’m here, what time is it?”  The GPS isn’t completely necessary for the WiFi phone-home method to work. There are databases of WiFi networks and their location (the iPhone uses those to help locate you!) so the gadget can phone home with the WiFi network and probably get the time that way.

The server can have a much larger daylight savings time database than the gadget (and one more easily updated with the vagaries of humans). The weak point of this plan is the server… if the gadget can’t get there, it will act stupid.

In the car, the gadgets don’t have WifFi so things like the iPad don’t get updated until we get to a hotel and log on. Then, the iPad, disconcertingly, loses an hour sometime between I get used to it being wrong and when I look at it again and wonder how it got so late.

There isn’t  a standard for how to do this conversion from location to local time. Well, there is the Network Identity and Time Zone protocol but if you go look at that you’ll notice is isn’t exactly a networking protocol with the ubiquity of NTP. Instead, it is phone based.

The iPhone is actually a cell phone (yes, I know it is a somewhat terrible phone but it has cellular technology so we’ll give it the benefit of the doubt). As this gadget moves, it connects to the cell towers and asks, “Beg pardon, but do you have the time?” and changes to the new time if the cell towers give something different than the device’s current time.

So, all a gadget needs is a cellular modem and a contract with one of the major cell phone vendors. Then it can function as a reasonably accurate clock, always updating to local time.

Or the gadget can just assume its customer never leaves their home time zone and make them set the initial time. And then it can use a crummy real time clock and let the time drift. Not that big of a deal, the clock will be correct-enough 99% of the time. Since we want our gadgets to be cheap, not many things can afford to have all the supporting hardware.

(Thanks to Christopher White who complained enough about broken gadgets that I put this together._

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Just walk in my footsteps

April 22, 2012

We are not the first people to do this cross county road trip. And since we are going slow and not trying to get anywhere in a hurry, it should be fun.

I should point out that my husband has actually done it a few times but always as a child (or teenager) in the back seat, never as a driver and planner. What is more, his parents and sister have done it a whole bunch of times. His dad has done over 28 round trips… 56 one ways. So, we can totally do this.

C’s dad (Ed) gave us the list he wrote up a few years back for another family member. I will share it with you.

 Travel checklist

Car (Errors here are inconvenient in the home theater but possibly catastrophic on a cross continent trip.)

  1. Complete auto check (? dealership) and service I-2 weeks prior to leaving
  2. Do not leave without GOOD tires (at least 10,000 miles of tread left), inflated to the right pressure. Balanced and aligned! Check the pressure almost daily on the trip! Under inflated tires in the desert in summer are BAD. Have a good tire gauge.
  3. Make sure your spare is good and inflated
  4. Good brake linings.
  5. Make sure A/C is checked and charged August; 110-122 degrees in the shade in some places for hundreds of miles! A/C failure is a disaster.
  6. New wipers and full washer fluid
  7. Very important! All hoses in good repair and radiator with no leaks and good coolant! Failure of this system will occw in the worst place, under the worst conditions at the worst time. You have long climbs to fairly high elevations in hot weather, 40 to 50 miles from any help
  8. Make sure all your lights work.

Travel

  1. Have drinking water with you.
  2. Essential stuff to have and take in at night with you:
    • A good flashlight with good batteries;
    • A weather radio, with severe weather alert alarm;
    • A backup set of car keys carried separately;
    • Have your CS, Pepper spray or Mace.
    • Pick up a simple doorknob travel security alarm (or other type) for the motels.
  3. Pre-plan your stops and confirm a place to stay. You don’t want to arrive tired and late only to find poor or no accommodations and have to search an unfamiliar area. Some of these places are NOT where you want to wander around at night or day.
  4. Watch the weather station before leaving each day.
  5. Know the weather ahead (and what is coming behind you) for the day and don’t drive into black clouds. It is better to stay put for a day than drive into red-boxed weather! In Calif I NEVER experienced the kind of rain and weather you can encounter in the central and eastern part of the country. It can rapidly become impossible to drive and dangerous to stop! Since most of the big weather systems move roughly South/Southwest toward East/NorthEast if you don’t know what is going on you would end up driving in a system the whole way! Misery! You may see none of this, but. . .
  6. Have an alternate route pre-planned or mapped whenever possible.
  7. Have your maps, triptik and your GPS. Make sure your co-pilot can use them while you drive. It is good diversion too.
  8. Make your fuel stops at big, well-lighted sites (major truck and auto stops) and don’t assume they are safe either.
  9. Avoid “rest stops” in general.
  10. Remember some stretches of road may have 50-75 miles of nothing. In Oklahoma them are two long toll roads about 100 miles each (basically no way around them) and you don’t want to have to exit them. The toll is something like $4.50 ea.
  11. Don’t ever get below 1/4 tank of gas.
  12. Assume you may be caught in construction delays and bad weather that will cost you I-2 hrs on any given day.
  13. Remember driving east you lose l/2 hour of light and 6me every 500 miles. This is really harder than it seems if you are pushing the drive and/or sleeping late, especially if you lose added time to weather or construction.
  14. Stay the Hell away from trucks! This is actually hard to do. Do not sit next to them or get trapped following behind someone who is not passing and just sitting next to them at 70 MPH On the open road it is often totally different than So Cal freeways (which are bad enough). Trucks often travel in clusters of five to ten (virtual convoys), pushing hard (some at75-85 mph) and changing lanes without much caution when they run up onto slow traffic. They may not see you! There will often be only two lanes. Also they will run up your back. Additionally, a recent change we’ve noticed is that trucks traveling at a slower “safe” speed in the right lane are often weaving! (Text messaging? TV? Who knows..).
  15. There are many areas “mined” by troopers with a variety of radar, laser, and airborne support (OK, TX and Missouri esp ). In this economy they are likely to be fund raising. Best to travel somewhat behind the traffic that works for you and not be the point person of the group
  16. Check-in with someone daily at least. We always do. It is a big place to try to track someone’s whereabouts.
  17. Don’t trust anyone. Listen, but don’t give out too much real information in conversations (especially how far you are going or that you are traveling alone). You could always be meeting your husband at dinner, in the morning or in a few miles.
  18. When you stop you WILL be noticed (by whom?).
  19. Park you car at night close to the entrance and in the most secure lighted area possible. This is often difficult. Anything of value visible inside the car may be gone by morning, and a break-in will cost you two days at least. I suspect that in the current economy that risk is greater.
  20. No one goes anywhere alone.
  21. Almost everything noted above is &om direct and at times unfortunate experience! Radiators, tires, A/C, weather, truck encounters, tickets, being lost in bad places, break-ins, etc. We’ve driven across the country 26 round trips, i.e 52 times one way. At least 182,000 miles of cross country driving Even when prepared it can be tough.
  22. You will likely have a GREAT trip if you keep all that stuff in mind There is a lot to see. Think of this like a pilot with a checklist. Forced landings are not good.

 

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