Author: matthew

Last week, my boss and I were talking about strange coincidences in life. This past week, a young girl walking her dog after a snowstorm was struck by a tree branch and killed. Back in my boss’s home country of Nigeria, an ancient tree fell over on a bus — the only vehicle on the road at the time — during a windstorm, crushing the entire bus and killing all the passengers, including his uncle. He related the tale of, when he was in the UK, a skydiver who’s parachute failed to open landing on a chain-link fence just right to be able to survive the fall from 7,000 feet.

Of course, there are the serendipitous coincidences as well. For instance, my wife, Christy, took a picture of me two years before we ever met each other. We had apparently attended the same summer camp, and she took a picture of the winning square-dance team, which I was on. I often wonder how my life would be different had we met two years earlier… I kept in touch with a lot of girls I’d met at that camp 🙂

The coincidental thing about coincidences is that if they did not happen, that would be the biggest coincidence of all. So what are the strangest coincidences you have experienced in your lifetime?

I’m a big fan of real irony. Situations where the outcome is the opposite of that which is expected. That’s irony. The fact that Alanis Morisette’s “Isn’t it Ironic?” song actually contains no irony? That’s irony. You know what else is irony? This.

Dick Morris recently noted, regarding the four leading GOP presidential contenders in 2008 (John McCain, Mitt Romney, Newt Gingrich and Rudy Giuliani):

“And then there are the personal lives – the only one of these guys who hasn’t had multiple wives is the Mormon.”

Ironic. And kind of funny, too.

I had the most bizarre dream some time ago (the night of December 30-31, to be exact)…

I received a telephone call from my brother, Jay late at night. “Matt, we really need your help over at Wahoo Studios” — the old name for Ninjabee — “and could offer you a good salary to help us get our network under control.”

So I took a vacation day from my day job a big, nameless, faceless corporation, to show up in a dingy basement suite similar to my bygone days at Singletrac. Since I am an early riser, there were not many people there yet. Yet I had forgotten something important that morning.

I had shown up in my pajamas.

Luckily, being the prepared person that I temporarily pretend to be when I show up at a new job, I had a nice pair of slacks, dress shoes, and a freshly-pressed red shirt in my duffel bag. After visiting the restroom to change, and the briefest of introductions to the boss — who seemed completely unruffled with me having shown up in pajamas, as if it were the most normal thing in the world — I was shown my cubicle.

Not really a cubicle, though. It was a desk, shoved up against two other desks, their sides to this one’s back. I had a lone LCD monitor perched atop this rickety contraption, and next to it was an absolutely massive joystick. Something vaguely unsettling there, as this particular joystick has a strong phallic resemblance. And it’s a “force feedback” joystick, in that when you try to move it around, it sometimes stiffens up in response to in-game events.

Anyway, I started typing away, and suddenly a hand reaches from the desk abutting mine and spins my LCD monitor 180 degrees, leaving the back facing me. I peeked around to see Michael Jackson (not the pop singer, but a graphic artist resident to the Salt Lake City area) staring at me over his goatee. “We practice Extreme Programming here, sport,” he said snappily, “and now it’s my turn to use the monitor.”

So I got up and walked around. I stumbled into a conference room and sat down to look above me. Much to my consternation, rather than air conditioners in the windows, there were Sun V240 servers hanging out, exposed to the wind and rain, with their rack screws screwed into windowsills.

“Boy, do I have my work cut out for me,” I muttered softly, aghast at the spaghetti mess of wires above my head.

“Always nice to meet a man who knows his work,” said a jovial, fat fellow I did not know who appeared next to me. “The network in this place is an absolute abomination, I tell you! Just wait until you see the data center!”

He led me through hallways to an area with a raised floor. He explained that this was where the servers which hosted their massively-multiplayer online game resided. I peered through the windows into the dimly-lit, humid room beyond. A gigantic black widow was perched on the blue and yellow CAT-5 cables, whistling softly to herself and polishing the glassy end of a thin orange fiber-optic cable. She peered up from her work, over her horn-rimmed glasses, and grinned at me. “That’s Sheila,” explained the fat man. “She’s eaten our last two network admins, but she never smiled at them. She likes you.”

“Black widows eat their mates,” I said softly.

Yes, I know it’s bizarre and surreal, but aren’t most dreams?

Slow news day…

So checking out the headlines this morning, I didn’t see anything which really pulled me in. I mean, there was some nerdy stuff about how people aren’t clamoring to have themselves implanted with RFID chips. There was the story of the conviction of the former Mormon bishop who went snowmobiling in the nude with kids from his ward. Drake Tungsten blogged about Mordenkinen’s Plot Hammer and how he hates being railroaded when playing a video game. A bunch of NASCAR racers have been found to be cheating (I think they were just doing what they were used to doing, and it had always been given the nod, and then someone got a burr in their butt to strictly enforce that rule regarding airflow holes).

In other news today, Wal-Mart’s “Great Value” and Peter Pan Peanut Butter cause food poisoning. A quantum computer plays Sudoku. And finally, a Japanese company creates beer from milk.

For those of you who have trouble waking up in the morning, I present: The Danger Bomb Alarm Clock.

Yep, that’s right, this alarm clock makes you connect three wires in the correct sequence before it shuts off. If you fail your mission, it blows up! Well, not really, it just makes a loud “explosion” noise. These days, I use an old-style “clanger” alarm clock in the bathroom which gets me up and out of bed on time, but I’m always open to new, creative methods to get me going in the morning.

I still think a coffee maker with a timer might be a better investment, though 🙂

Thought for the day:

There is an inverse correlation between: A) The likelihood of someone calling me on the phone to obtain the resolution to a technical problem (rather than using IM, email, or blog), and B) The likelihood that I can fix the problem remotely.

In other words, the more likely someone is to call me on the phone to help them with a computer problem, the less likely they have the technical competence to carry out whatever instructions I might give them.

There is another inverse correlation as a result of this… The more likely someone is to call me on the phone about a computer problem, the less I want to talk to them.

True for you?

Tonight, a lone gunman with no clear motive opened fire in Trolley Square, a popular, up-scale mall about thirty miles from my house. Five victims dead, several hospitalized, and the gunman dead. Random. Senseless. Bizarre, and kind of surreal that this just happened about five miles from where I work. We go to this mall to have dinner a few times a year.

I feel for the families of the victims, and yet perversely I’m most curious about the motive of the shooter. What possible explanation could their be for walking into a shopping mall and gunning down random customers?

I don’t get it.

Maybe that’s a good thing.

Because so many people are searching for it and this page ended up on the front page of Google when people search for “Trolley Square Shooting Victims”, let me share the info most people are looking for.

ID of the shooter: Sulejman Talovic, 18, Bosnian refugee living in the US. He left Bosnia two years before the massacre in his home village, though some relatives are certain this had a profound effect on him and factored into his killing spree. Yes, he is Moslem, but his family escaped here to get away from the war and turmoil of their home country and live in peace.

Gunman stopped by: Kenneth Hammond, an off-duty police officer from Ogden (a town quite a few miles north) exercising his right to carry a concealed weapon in Utah. He was on a date with his wife. Hammond saw the shooter, told his wife to get away, and was shot at by Talovic. He returned fire with his Kimber sidearm, and then with the help of local police eventually killed the gunman.

Killed: Jeffrey Walker (52) Vanessa Quinn (28) Kirsten Hinckley (15) Teresa Ellis (28) Brad Franz (24)

Wounded: Carolyn Tuft (44) Stacy Hanson (53) Shawn Munns (34) Alan Jeffery Walker (16)

So here’s a question for you guys: what, in your opinion, makes for a happy marriage?

I ask this because I found myself thinking of one of Sammy G’s relatives over this weekend. Sammy, his Mom, and I took a trip to new Jersey to check out Rutgers. (I shoulda’ gone there! Or maybe UMBC… anyway…) At one point, we had a big dinner and as we were walking out, this immensely fat old dude (Sammy’s relative) quips, “This is the secret to long life: lots of cigars, lots of good food, and lots of good friends. These health nuts, they run every day. They lift weights. They eat right. They still die at thirty-five of a heart attack. Me, I smoke a cigar every day, have never run a day in my life, drink too much, and I’m old.” (I don’t remember how old he was then, but it seemed immensely old to me.)

That ties in, for me, because genetics play such a huge role in an individual’s lifespan. Many people have perfect teeth, not because they take care of them, but because their genes create good teeth without regard for hygiene. Many people live a long time not due to their diet and exercise choices, but because of their genetic composition.

Admittedly, lifestyle plays an important role, but I can’t help but wonder: Could genetics also play an important role in fidelity and marital satisfaction? I’m happy and fairly satisfied with my relationship with my wife, and I can’t help but wonder why I seem to have an easier time remaining content with a monogamous relationship than some others.

I’ve been saying it for years, but finally another blogger has pictures to prove it.

A picture is worth a thousand words. Or, in this case, system calls. And possibly more than a few thousand.

The net is abuzz this week with news about an un-patented drug called “DCA” (dichloroacetic acid or dichloroacetate). It has been used until now for treatment of rare metabolic disorders involving malfunctioning mitochondria. Recent animal tests with human cancers have shown that DCA reactivates cancer’s deactivated mitochondria, causing cancer cells to have a more normal lifespan compared to the tissues they sprang from. It turns out the mitochondria play a critical role in determining how long a particular cell lives, and cancer cells shut their mitochondria off as they become starved for resources due to their enormous growth.

There’s only one problem with DCA: it’s in the public domain. That means no large pharmaceutical companies are going to be funding human research and FDA approval of the drug. Now, I’m a big fan of open source in software. Could open-source medicine be the next big trend? Let’s find out… donation instructions are listed in the article.