If you’ve found this blog, then you’ve made some sort of mistake. I currently exist at Purely Random, which is a domain I aquired as an undergrad. Please stop by that page and give it a read.

I started reading Scott Berkun’s blog about a month ago after I started to really get into one of his books (The Art of Project Management). He has a very clear perspective on what it means to actually accomplish something (and even have a good plan for what that something is), and I’ve grown to really enjoy his insights (and stories). He recently posted the following to his blog (see the whole post):

Everyone in the tech-sector goes through a phase early in their career where they’re proud of their hours. At software and consulting companies everwhere, circles of 20 something friends debate, over drinks each night, who’s put in crazier hours – “I worked 70 hours last week”, “70? I worked 70 hours in 3 days.” “3 days? I worked 70 hours this morning, before breakfast.” And on it goes. It’s a kind of dumb male pride in size of things, rather that quality or, god forbid, actual hapiness. To work 70 hours is a statement of work, not of progress. For every idiot working 70 hours there’s a smarter, wiser man who’s doing the same amount of work in 50 because he’s paying more attention to results than the clock. I’d rather be, and rather hire, that man.

I liked this whole post, because it really hits on an issue that I’m continually grappling with. I’m still that guy in his twenties that thinks more hours is more better. At some level, I know that’s not the case, and I feel like I’ve gotten a lot better. But still, my friends all tend to agree that I still work to hard. I think the whole thing is amplified by the fact that I’m languishing in grad school and feel like there’s no possible way for me to be productive. Productivity in grad school is publishing papers that no one will ever read, and I have a difficult time swallowing that kind of productivity. At the end of the day, I don’t feel like I’ve accomplished anything–even if I have put in a 70 hour week.

So I’m actively trying to step away from grad school for at least a few years. I feel like I’ve gotten a lot out of what time I’ve spent earning a masters and starting on a Ph.D., but it has really shown me that academia is not the place for me. I used to think that industrial research was the place for me, but even that seems not to be the case. I would really rather spend my time working on a team that can directly impact the bottom line. So that at the end of the day, I can say more than, “look, I really understand this problem and can theorize about possible solutions.” Instead, I want to say, “Look at this thing that the people around me really needed and appreciate. I was an important part of bringing to reality.” Most of my friends already know about this, and for the most part I’m succeeding in finding opportunities. At this point, nothing about my future is certain, and uncertainty leads to fear (and eventually even to the dark side).

I turned on my televisions for a few minutes this afternoon. Normally, I watch just about zero television, but I wasn’t really motivated to do much with myself this afternoon. I happened upon a channel that I hadn’t seen before: Style. This was surprising, because I have the most basic form of cable possible. I would never have watched it, but I thought I recognized Lisa Loeb in the foreground on some street corner in New York City. She was talking about meeting guys, which was intriguing given that it was Lisa Loeb. I’ve always been fascinated by her and typically enjoy her music, so I watched for a while. It was actually that “Number One Single” show she apparently has now. I think I had heard something about it at some point, but it seems to be focussed on cameras following her around as she meets guys in her quest for “the one.” I ended up watching the whole show, and sometime later I had a realization: there is no Mr. Right.

First, I’ll note that every single guy they showed a clip of was horribly weird. Granted, they were being filmed while on a date with a semi-well known musician. Even the guys in which she was semi-interested, seemed a little off–a little hard to like. Interactions between Lisa and each guy seemed uncomfortable. Now, there are a lot of normal guys out there, but apparently it’s hard to happen upon them. Even so, there must be even more girls looking for normal guys. Does that mean that we’re all doomed? Well, now. I think the real issue is that “normal” is so poorly defined. I may think of myself as a pretty normal guy, but I’m not really. But still, I feel like I can hold a conversation with most anyone and make myself at least appear normal. The guys Lisa was meeting didn’t even seem capable of that. Or at least, they were so confident in the legitimacy of their deviation from normal that they just embraced it (probably thinking it made them seem cool).

And this starts to really hit on my realization. There is no normal. No two people will ever meet such that every behavior of one is viewed as totally normal to the other. So, when you go out on a first date, and the person you’re with seems a little off, it’s because he is. He’s a little off from your expectation of what you had in mind. You may align on certain issues, but never everything (or even nearly so). There will always be something he does, says, or believes that will be horribly wrong and very much not normal. So what is it that we’re all looking for? Everyone is out there looking for the right person, and some people are actually happy. What are they doing if they have no possible chance of “success.”

I think the reality is that when we find the right person, we actually find someone whose weirdness we have grown to understand and appreciate. You can never tell whether you’ve found that person based on a few interactions. It takes time. If you think you’ve found exactly the right person after one date, then he’s probably just really good at presenting the image you wanted to see. You don’t want to be with someone that dishonest, do you? Growing to totally accept someone as “the one” requires time and adjustment. It requires growing to understand a person’s oddities: why they exist and why they seem perfectly reasonable to him. It requires some level of accept those oddities for what they are. Remember, he probably sees just as many oddities in you and has to learn to appreciate all of them.

I guess I wrote this post from a weird perspective. I hate always spelling out both male and female pronouns, so I kind of had to pick whether I was going to refer to a significant other as a him or as a her. We all know that “they” is an incorrect replacement, right? I mean, it only works for the third person plural. Anyway, I chose to use “he” and “him,” to refer to the generic significant other. I mean, I did start with refering to such a person as not “Mr. Right,” didn’t I? So the post kind of reads as if I’m telling a girl what she should be looking for in “Mr. Right.” Whatever that means.

I made some chocolate chip cookies for Sally this Valentine’s Day. In particular I made one of them in the shape of a heart and served it with some ice cream and hot fudge. The recipe I used is one I have been perfecting over the past few years, so I was hopefull that they would meet her standards. Unfortunately, she didn’t like them as much as the chocolate chip cookies recipe off the back of a bag of chocolate chips. I couldn’t figure out what it was that made her not like my cookies, until now…

My Aunt always used to make exceptional cookies, and I never really knew why her’s always turned out so much better than mine. I suppose I should have just asked for her recipe, but I ended up experimenting a lot. The following progression of events and trials led to the secret I had been looking for: butter flavored shortening.

One day I came across a recipe that called for shortening instead of butter (or, more accurately, half butter and half shortening). Well, that made all the difference. It lead to the soft, fluffy cookies I always remember my aunt making when I was a kid. They were thick and didn’t just collapse into the pan when baked (like my original cookies). The only problem with using shortening was that the taste of the cookies was a little off. Well, two days before Valentines Day, I stumbled upon butter flavored shortening. Perfect. That’s what I used to make the cookies for Sally, and I thought the result was fantastic. I used butter-flavored shortening (not just half and half with real butter) and completed the ensemble with big chocolate chunks (what’s better than big chunks of chocolate, right?).

The only problem is that Sally didn’t like them. She said they weren’t sweet enough, and I should have just made the recipe from the bag of chocolate chips. I pulled out a bag of chocolate chips and compared to my recipe, and the only real difference was my use of shortening. This was my dillema. I loved the effect of the shortening, but Sally didn’t like the result. From then on, I would have to choose between cookies I liked and cookies she liked: the two couldn’t mutually coexist.

The good news is, that I’m a moron, and the shortening/butter wasn’t the only difference between my recipe and the bag’s. I had completely forgotten about it until just today, but it all makes sense. See, I’m a bit of a “health-tard” sometimes. I was making the chips late at night the day before Valentines Day, and for some reason it occured to me that I should use a little whole wheat flour in my cookies. Why not? Whole wheat flour makes everything else tastier and just a little healthier. I substiuted exactly one cup of the stuff for an equal amount of white flour. Except, then I went to bed and completely forgot about my decision. It is that decision that must have caused the flavor difference that Sally noticed. I haven’t tested it yet, but if that’s the difference, then I can make chocolate chip cookies with butter-flavored shortening (and all of their associated fluffy-ness) and still please Sally’s somewhat discerning tastes (yay). I just need to skip the whole wheat flour, but that’s not a big deal: they are, after all, cookies.

I found someone else with a WordPress blog, and I liked the simplicity of it. That brings me here: with a WordPress.com hosted blog. I now have three blogs created with various hosts (Blogger, LiveJournal, and now WordPress), but none of them are really active.

I guess I’m search of “the perfect host.” Maybe I just need to decide already and go for it. I’m even thinking about installing my own copy of WordPress in my PurelyRandom web space. Actually, that site was a kind of home-brewed entry into the world of “blogging” that I created a few years ago. At the time, I was an undergraduate and had the time (and motivation) to go out and create such a thing. Unfortunately, I was also a miserable software engineer at the time. I think that’s the real reason behind my trying out every blogging host under the sun. I have this idea that I’ll reinvigorate that site and deploy a new version that can become active again. Except it just doesn’t make sense. The amount of time and effort required to do such a thing is enormous, and people have already done much better than what I could ever accomplish (WordPress is a good example of that).

So I think my master plan is to admit the lunacy of my deep desire to create a new home-spun blog and just accept partial success with a copy of WordPress running at PurelyRandom. That’s probably the best solution possible. I get to leverage the work of the community with WordPress, but also have access to all the source. I’ve looked through the associated PHP scripts a little bit already, and it seems to be coded reasonably well, so why not. I’ll be sure to post a link to the PurelyRandom variant here if I ever follow through.