Archive for the ‘Personal’ Category
Can someone give me directions to grad school?
Posted by Benjamin Geiger in Education, Personal on November 25th, 2009
I wish I could just drop a class
Or get into a play
Or change my major
Or fuck my T.A.
I need an academic advisor to point the way
– “I Wish I Could Go Back to College”, Avenue Q
When I graduated from USF, I decided to take a year or two to get out into the real world before I started on my Master’s degree. That was 2006. There are now about five weeks remaining in 2009. That means three and a half years have passed since I graduated. I’ve been working at my current job for two of those years. I’ve seen the real world. I don’t like it.
Now I’m considering what I really want to do with my life. What I want to do is teach; to be specific, I want to be a professor. Professorship requires a graduate degree, preferably a doctorate. So I’ve made up my mind: I’m going to work toward entering grad school.
But I have no idea what to do next.
I know I need to take the GRE. That’s first on my list. I’m also going to speak to a graduate admissions counselor at USF; they should be able to tell me what else to do. I also need to figure out the financial end of things. I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep working where I work while going to school in Tampa. If I can get a job on campus, that would be ideal.
Regarding housing: north Lakeland may be my best bet. It’s a straight shot down I-4 to USF, and rent on apartments isn’t ridiculously high, but it’s still 30-40 miles each way. Granted, that’s better than the 70 each way I was doing when going to USF before, but that’s still quite a drive.
I need advice.
Pick-up (bullshit) artists.
Posted by Benjamin Geiger in Personal on August 12th, 2009
(Based on a comment I made at Pandagon.)
A discussion between Gabe and Tycho over at Penny Arcade has sparked responses across the interwebs.
As the epitome of what the PUA-types would call an “AFC“, I almost fell for the PUA nonsense. Eventually I realized that I absolutely loathe 99.9% of the PUA stuff out there. Most of it seems to boil down to “Chicks dig assholes, so here’s how you become an asshole”.
I don’t want to be an asshole. My stepdad was an asshole. I grew up seeing what being an asshole does to a person, to a relationship, to a family. And my conscience won’t allow it. While my rational mind keeps saying that PUA stuff makes sense, and may even be effective (the jury’s still out on that), my conscience screams, “Try it and I shut you down.” (PUA types call that being an AFC. My psychiatrist calls it severe social anxiety.)
However, it’s unwise to tar every self-help resource for shy men with the same brush as the mass-market PUA stuff. There are “PUA” resources that don’t teach guys to be manipulative dickheads. I’ve been listening to an audiobook called Overcoming the Nice Guy Syndrome, by Ron Louis and David Copeland. It could be described loosely as a PUA system, but it doesn’t seem to have the “hunting” mentality. Neither does it promise to let you sleep with any woman. In fact, much of the advice deals with giving the woman you’re flirting with opportunities to express her lack of interest or bow out gracefully.
In other words, it appears to be genuinely about giving guys like me the confidence to do what normal guys, the “good guys”, do naturally.
I really hope I’m not wrong about this.
On offense.
Posted by Benjamin Geiger in Activism, Personal, Work on June 27th, 2009
As I wrote earlier, I had this sticker on my laptop:
Had. Past tense. The reasons for its removal are two.
My supervisor was the first to object, basically handing down the edict that I wouldn’t be allowed to bring the laptop (on which I do 99% of my work) to any meetings if the sticker remained. Considering at least two of my coworkers are religion-soaked god-botherers who don’t hesitate to share their religious views with any who will tolerate them, this seemed, if you’ll accept a mild understatement, extremely hypocritical. The hypocrisy is all the more obnoxious when you realize that I work for a government agency, theoretically under the restrictions of the First (and Fourteenth) Amendment.
The sticker itself was printed on Office Depot bumper sticker paper, which is easily peeled off and repositioned. So I ‘repositioned’ it from the laptop to the wall of my office. This was generally considered acceptable; they apparently don’t mind me holding my beliefs (or lack thereof), only being uppity enough to remind the Christaliban that there are people who disagree with them.
But that’s not why I took it entirely down.
One of my coworkers (and a friend I knew before I started working there) is a devout Muslim. He pointed out that the sticker was, in his eyes and the eyes of those attending his mosque, an endorsement of hatred. And after reflecting on it a bit, I realized I agreed with him. Some small-minded xenophobes could take that as an attack, not on religion in general, but specifically on Islam… and specifically endorsing violence. That’s not the message I want to send.
I’m not ’shying away’ from criticizing Islam because I agree with it, and not because I somehow think it’s ‘better’ than Christianity or Judaism or Buddhism or Hinduism. I most certainly don’t. Islam is the religion most easily corrupted into fundamentalism and hatred, and it easily ranks among the worst in terms of widespread abuse. And I certainly didn’t take it down due to fear of a fatwa death sentence. I took down the sticker because Muslims in the US are already suffering persecution (and I mean honest persecution, not the “waaah, someone said something mean about us” sense that many Christians profess), and the last thing I want to do is give the right-wing mouth-breathing god-wallopers another excuse to commit violence against the innocent.
Bumper Sticker Activism.
Posted by Benjamin Geiger in Activism, Personal on June 15th, 2009
It was time to decorate my laptop; it has its share of scratches and dents, and I could personalize. So, I tried to find bumper stickers that worked well. Problem: not many work well. Most of the time, my positions are too nuanced to fit in a dozen words or less.
The “Atheist Bus” campaign was a reasonable start. I didn’t want to use their slogan, but I wanted to show solidarity through similar design. So, I found the font they used: “Dirty Headline“. In finding it, I found what is probably the most memorable pro-science quote I’ve ever heard. Fire up Seashore, throw some colors together, add in a gratuitous Out Campaign scarlet-A logo, and voilà!
And I realized I really like the font. So, I found another idea that had been rattling around my head for a while. For this one, I had to upgrade to the Gimp because Seashore doesn’t seem to have a rainbow gradient, but I think it was worth it:
I bought some inkjet bumper sticker paper from Office Depot and printed these out… and they turned out great. I wouldn’t put them on my car, since they don’t seem particularly weatherproof, but on the computer I have no such worries. The atheism sticker is currently on my laptop; the second one isn’t yet, since I overestimated the free space on the display. (I own a MacBook Pro and don’t want to cover up the glowing status symbol.)
Feel free to download and print these; high-resolution versions of both are available. As for licensing, they’re Creative Commons Share-Alike; I can’t see putting heavy restrictions on something that only took me an hour or so to create. So, share and enjoy!
On the pulling-up of roots.
Posted by Benjamin Geiger in Personal, Work on May 27th, 2009
Someone I follow on Twitter bemoaned the lack of job applicants who knew about test driven development, saying that the first candidate he interviewed who knew TDD would be hired on the spot. Of course, as an incorrigible smartass, I asked whether it required actual experience with the practice.
The answer was no, and he invited me to send him a résumé.
My reaction was mixed. First was elation: holy crap, this guy actually thinks I might have a shot at working there! That was short-lived, however, as my loyalty and my anxiety simultaneously kicked in: not only would I have to quit my current job, I’d have to move about two hours away.
That’s really what I’m concerned about. I don’t particularly mind the thought of leaving my current job. It’s clear that I’m not a perfect match for my current employer. I rock the boat too much. But leaving the friends I’ve made here would be difficult. Hell, my dad lives about 45 minutes away and I only see him a couple of times per month. I can’t see driving 2 hours each way to visit Bartow, particularly with practically nothing else to lure me back. Also, with the hiring freeze in effect, it’s likely that they wouldn’t hire anybody to replace me, increasing the workload on everyone else.
The other issue is that this place feels like home now. I live in an apartment, but it’s home. Not to mention the hassle involved in moving. (I just bought a washer and dryer, for cryin’ out loud!) There’s no way I’m going to haul my furniture—in particular, my heavy-ass desks—down the stairs and into a new place by myself.
So, there’s a lot of inertia keeping me here. What’s driving me toward Ocala?
Primarily, the reason I’m considering accepting a job with the aforementioned company in Ocala if offered is simple: they seem to get it. I work for a large government agency, and even with a small department, it’s nearly impossible to change as fast as modern software development requires. Besides, I’ve met the guy who told me about the place (the one I follow on Twitter) and he seems to be someone I’d get along with. And needless to say, I could learn a lot about TDD and other agile practices, and programming in general, from him.
Just to be clear: I haven’t been offered a job yet. I haven’t interviewed for a job yet. I don’t even know if a job’s even open. But the idea is still there. And the same applies anywhere in the country; in fact, even more so, since a two-hour drive would be replaced with an airline flight. If I don’t live near either of my parents, I could just as easily live anywhere in the country. The question is whether I want to do so. And I genuinely don’t know.
