{"id":132,"date":"2002-09-23T23:07:59","date_gmt":"2002-09-24T03:07:59","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/wordpress\/not_far_from_the_tree"},"modified":"2002-09-23T23:07:59","modified_gmt":"2002-09-24T03:07:59","slug":"not_far_from_the_tree","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/2002\/09\/not_far_from_the_tree.html","title":{"rendered":"Not Far From the Tree"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sunday dinner with the folks, and I saw a clothing catalog on the kitchen counter. Actually, it was a mostly-shoes-with-a-few-handbags catalog. Now the weird part about the catalog wasn’t<\/b> the fact that the models in the catalog were all deleriously<\/em> happy. After all, I suppose buying a nice pair of shoes can<\/em> make one happy, and who am I to call into question the degree and quality of such happiness? Of course, I think most people reserve such expressions of overwhelming joy for truly<\/em> blessed events, such as the birth of one’s first child or advancing a step on the WarCraft III Ladder. But to each his or her own. Anyway, the really weird part was that despite their ecstasy at being in the same catalog as all these nice shoes, none of the models were actually shown wearing<\/em> any of them. Nor the handbags, for that matter. I just don’t think I’m ever going to understand Marketing for as long as I live. <\/p>\n

This week I’m taking a class on Solaris<\/a>. It’s a good class for me to take. No, scratch that — it’s a good thing<\/em> for me to know<\/em>. I’m not sure about the class<\/em> itself. First, the labs are not well-commented. For example, the lab will tell you to do something which is guaranteed<\/em> to fail (like, say, having a non-root<\/code> user try to add another user). Now this would be fine, except there’s no commentary saying, “Oops! You probably got Error X! That’s because of Y. What can you do to fix it? (Hint: consider Z.)” No, the lab just continues as if everything was hunky-dory. Anyway, this didn’t slow me down too much, but a few of the more brittle members of the class did get a bit flustered. Second, the instructor seems not to have fallen far from the stereotypical disdainful-lazy-sarcastic UNIX sysadmin tree. He’s not exactly like the Comic Book Guy<\/a> from the Simpsons or anything. But he’s a bit snide towards the people in the class who are struggling, and I don’t think that sort of behavior is helping them learn any faster. Well, if he doesn’t shape up soon, I’m going to mark him down on his teacher evaluation<\/em>. That’ll fix him.<\/p>\n

Finally, this weekend I saw an amateur production of Much Ado About Nothing<\/cite> in Sanborne Park near Los Gatos. My lovely and talented sister was assistant stage-managing, and as an added bonus, I ran into three Mudders<\/a> that I hadn’t seen in years. First there was Erik, who was donut-guy for my dorm freshman year, and who thus had undue influence on me during my formative years. Then there were Rob and Anna, very nice folks. Rob and Anna combined their last names after their marriage, and you know, I’m about 75% convinced that this approach is an entirely logical and fair way to handle the whole last name problem. The only problem in my particular case is that as far as I know, I’m the only young male Goer in the entire world<\/em>. So when I get married, I probably will be forced to stick with the traditional naming conventions, lest our ancient clan breed itself out of existence entirely. Whew. Try explaining that<\/em> to a nice young progessive lady. And then throw in the whole diamond story<\/a> for good measure. I have a feeling they’re not exactly gonna be lining up around the block, you know?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

If he doesn’t shape up soon, I’m going to mark him down on the teacher evaluations. That’ll fix him.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-132","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=132"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=132"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=132"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.goer.org\/Journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=132"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}