Blogs with Different Threads

Here are the two other threads I have so far:

http://knlblogblog.blogspot.com/

That is supposed to document whatever I find on the Web that is good in some way.

http://knl-scrabble.blogspot.com/
There is a nascent scrabble blog but I wish I knew what its niche is going to be.

I have discovered Google Sites

With Google Sites you can make your own website for free.
However if you want to put any scripts on it, you have to build a Google Gadget and publish it.
Here is my effort now:
http://sites.google.com/site/mathblab

The Chandelier

From a scrabble player from the Tucker Scrabble Club, #392 (http://www.scrabble-assoc.com/clubs/roster.html#l_392_1), while I was helping her move, I have acquired a chandelier. I am estimating its date of origin to be the 50's. The biggest piece of this contraption is a round horizontal disk, shiny silver with some tarnish and rust in some spots, to which the light bulbs are attached, and from which the dozens of glass pieces dangle. Looking up at it you would see four circular rings of these glass pieces and beyond them the shiny silvery disk from which they hang.

The construction seems to be pretty cheap, and the wiring is old. The chandelier has been stored in a very dusty attic or basement so the glass pieces are dulled by a surface of fine Georgia soil, and I have been washing them off in the sink. Unfortunately I ran one through the garbage disposal, so there is going to be at least one gap. I hope the eventual owner will see this gap as a charming reminder of the development of this precious and admirable object, as a gap between the teeth of a child at age seven.

The glass pieces are attached to four metal rings, each by a flexible rusty wire with a solid stopper at one end to keep the glass piece from falling off, and a bend where the wire goes through a hole in the ring. The rings in turn are held to the disk by shiny metal hooks, four to each ring, that are attached firmly to the disk.

Each glass piece has a back side which is completely flat and the front face is formed in a beveled shape with a pattern of ridges leading to the center. The overall shape is an enlongated hexagon so seen vertically the waist is a little wider than the head or foot of it. The front has six faces which are decorated by ridges elegantly curved and converging at the center.

When the dust and soil are washed off, which happens easily with water, the glass surface is delightful to my eye.

The direction that the crystals are hung on the rings is not consistent. Someone has worked on the chandelier, disassembling it and then reassembling it partly wrong and then giving it up for a lost cause, I surmise. It's been confusing to work with it because I misjudged which way the majority were pointing, misjudged whether they all point in the same direction, but now I have decided they should all point with the back towards the center and the patterned side facing out. This will entail considerable effort since each little wire has to be straightened, extracted, reinserted, and rebent. Even worse, some wires are missing, and it will not be possible to duplicate the color of the rusted wires - I don't dare try to replace every wire! Too much work for this lazy writer - it will be difficult enough just to find short flexible wire pieces - this kind of problem can be solved by using christmas ornament hangers, or the wires that come inside of a twist-tie.

Then when I get it fixed up the future of the chandelier will still be in great doubt. Would it sell on E-bay? Will my girlfriend love it or hate it? If I give it to Goodwill would it end up in the trash? Does Atlanta have a Habitat store? Questions abound, with few answers .... the Great Spirit will decide.

While I am washing off the glass pieces in the sink, I am thinking about writing my resume. Writing a resume means projecting myself in the best possible light, leaving out anything bad that happened, highlighting only the successes, and supporting the highlights with an array of successes, still filtering out anything bad that happened! This is not a natural process for me. My natural process is to find things that are wrong, and fix them, and later mope about why they were wrong, and thus hopefully avoid such problems in the future. My natural process is not to be a marketer! Or my habitual process is not to be a marketer. My goal in writing my resume is to bring out my inner marketer. I heard secondhand a statement that any enterprise must spend eighty percent of its budget on marketing. That is a marvel to me. That would explain why things are so high priced compared to their cost. Smarter consumerism could lower that ratio.

There is part I have not told you yet. Yesterday I washed the disk, after removing the rings and the light bulbs. The wiring got some water on it. The wiring is not covered by plastic, but by a thick woven sleeve, so that helps date the fixture as being somewhat antique. It could even be worth some serious money! Antique Road Show here I come! (Maybe not.) I was reminded of a graphic artist who worked with me once, who had the grave misfortune of being allocated a keyboard which I had used for a period in the past, which was thoroughly infiltrated with disgusting bits of food and dead skin. She had taken out the circuit board and was washing the circuit board in the sink when I told her I didn't think that would work. It turned out the keyboard did not survive, and went into the trash - another $20 keyboard lost, another ounce of heavy metal in a landfill for some future form of life and intelligence to find and enjoy.

Links to Sites

I'm contributing to maintaining and building some websites:

1) Mankind Project of Georgia - georgia.mkp.org - Men's Work

2) Inner Light Press - http://innerlightpress.com - Poetry for Linda Lee

Hello, World

Hello, World.

My purpose today is to start a blog to tell the world who I am, in a way. Here is a brief autobiography.

Born in the early 60's in Pennsylvania.

Lived with family in New Jersey, Michigan, and Indiana through high school.
Favorite beaches: Bethany Beach, Delaware and Atlantic City, New Jersey.

At age 6 and 7 behind our back yard we had a ditch and beyond the ditch was the school yard which was good for kites, swings, and a very big 15 foot hill where my bike speedometer could get up to 20 MPH! This was part of the Indianapolis Public School system for grades 1 and 2. (On the swings: I'm Mario Andretti! I'm A.J. Foyt!)

From third grade I remember a Rambler station wagon and a VW bus, field trips to DC and Chicago, riding a pony, minor bonfires, chess, and poker. There was a card game called Rook and a logic game called Wff-n-proof (well formed logical formulas with dice!) that I didn't grasp til much later.

Fourth through Eighth was a private grade school with decent academics and some good teachers but my social integration was fairly unsuccessful and I have a bad feeling when I remember it. During this time my parents split up.

High school career featured some math contests, physics lessons, computer programming, french, chem, phsyics, having a pizza-face, chess teams ... I actually went to two different high schools, ditching the colorful frightening downtown school after freshman year in favor of the impersonal huge one with better credentials. That was a 3 year high school mostly composed of people from 3 feeder high schools. So I mostly didn't know anybody in high school either.

My family went to Unitarian Universalist fellowship meetings in Indianapolis. This was an informal kind of group with lots of interesting people. Some of my romances came from there. This was a rich experience with a variety of exposure to Indiana parks, museums, speakers, visiting other churches, farms, etc. and I feel grateful for this!

For college I was at Penn, which is the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, PA. My major field was Mathematics, minor field Psychology, and some programming classes, and some random other things. My extracurricular was mainly the Ultimate Disc team and I could run like the wind! The team was called The Void and had some incredible throwers and jumpers on it. My favorite class was Math 370-371, Algebra, with Dr. Shatz, where I learned about linear algebra, group theory, ring theory etc. with the greatest Math Study Group ever.

My transportation all this time was mostly bicycle.

This brings us up to the early 80's.

I decided it would be a fun adventure to join the Peace Corps and I managed to get in to the Peace Corps for a 2 year job teaching high school math in Botswana. It was an adventure for sure. I remember Larry Keyes from Maun Secondary had a poster on his door that said: Life is a daring adventure ... or nothing. with a man on a surfboard. There was a wise woman connected with the training named Aunt Busi and her judgement of me was that I was a tourist. Maun is a town for tourists, in some people's eyes! The Peace Corps issued me a bicycle there too but it didn't do too well in the sand.

The culture shock on returning to Indianapolis was great as I lost a lot of status and connection to Maun and the people there. My mother comforted me and let me watch cable TV in her condo (having sold the house!) with her new husband for nearly a week before insisting I should stand on my own feet and get a job and an apartment! I found a job at Boehringer-Mannheim Diagnostics through a contact, Bruce Shuman, for 22K I think, Scientific Programmer I. Under the direction of project manager and physicist Richard Pemper I wrote a Fortran program to compute calibration numbers for vials of glucose meter test strips. I lived in apartments on Talbot Street and bought my first car, a used Mazda for $2000.

I felt at Beohringer-Mannheim I was failing to gain any kind of solid footing. I thought of applying to grad school. Based on small bits of information I applied to Georgia Tech graduate math school saying I was interested in chaos theory, computing, modeling the atmosphere, ... and around September 1989 I went there for orientation, and started taking classes. The mathematics department provided me with research assistantships and teaching assistantships. After some difficulties, I finished my dissertation in 1997. One of my diversions during this time was playing chess on the internet.

I wrote a Java applet to do Rubik's cube and it got me into one programming job although that was short-lived. Quicktime would be better for displaying a snowboard - the palette of colors in the Java applet was much too small to do shading well. Also I knew I was not up to creating a new database engine to compete with Microsoft Sql-Server.

Rather than stay broke in academia, not ready or willing to face the rigors of a postdoc and trying to get tenure, I found a programming job at a small company called Knowledge Networks in Atlanta. I worked hard there building a site on flaky platforms for online training systems. The company changed its name to Learn.Net. Under a series of ambitious managers I clung to that job like it was a life raft until late 2005 when I was eventually too burned out and too highly paid so the company let me go with a decent severance package.

In 2003 I went through a training program, a men's weekend, the New Warrior Training Adventure done by the Mankind Project of Georgia. I have been involved with an I Group, their Lodge Keepers Society, and been on staff for three trainings. I've found great personal growth through this organization. I can say that they've saved my life.

Around the same time I discovered internet scrabble and started playing in scrabble clubs and tournaments.

Since leaving Learn.Net I have been on vacation, healing from all the chaotic history I have been through, enjoying relaxing, discovering my creative side, getting organized, and planning for the future. I now plan to move to Austin, TX to live with a sweet and wonderful female, and look for some kind of work in Austin.

I have a brother who lives in Michigan. My parents live in Indianapolis. I have also been in touch with my mother's family and my father's family to a lesser degree.