Uncommon commonalities

Monday came too quickly this week after studying pretty much all weekend long. My first homework of the semester was due on Monday - some practice questions for extra credit in Biology. They were over Dimensional Analysis, a way of converting from one unit to another that involves the metric system. I love it and wish I'd known about it in high school. It's entirely possible I was taught it then. :D

As I arrived on campus and saw stressed classmates in the study and help areas, it became clear that there are different levels of students. It seems that most of them hadn't given themselves enough time to do the work, and didn't understand what they were doing. I was really surprised that nearly everyone I spoke to said they only did 3 or 4 of the 12-problem assignment. And then as we were about to turn in the work, I saw people hurriedly copying things they forgot to do because they hadn't read the instructions well (show work in pencil on another sheet of paper) when the teacher re-iterated them just before turn-in. In contrast, I felt like a geek for being prepared - 3 pages of clearly shown work on 12 problems, answers boxed, etc, ready to go when I walked in. I also felt smart. And I'm just surprised at the seeming general level of unpreparedness. Maybe I really am from another planet. Or, as my grandmother often asserts - a genius. They really made me look like a genius.

All that aside, I really like the Biology class a lot. The teacher is great - she has a calendar and tells us exactly all the points and grading system and so on which removes all the administrative questions and wondering. She also has a great way of understanding the material and relating that to us in examples, interactive questions, and so on. The lab was a ton of fun even though it was basically working through measurement problems (volume, density, length, weight, etc). Biology is great. I'm learning a lot of really interesting and detailed things that clarify things I thought I knew, but have an inflection I'd not understood before. School rocks.

Chemistry is going to be interesting but it's moving at a slower pace. Tonight, the 3rd night of class we are getting into Atoms. The teacher is more ambiguous about the tests and has an interesting Scottish/Hindu/Asian accent I can't place which sometimes makes it hard to hear terms he's using. "Eelehmens" = "Element". But it's not a huge obstacle. He clearly knows what he's talking about, and he also is teaching me many things about chemistry I sort of knew about that now is becoming more concrete.

Overall, I have the theme of nutrition in mind, though, and I take examples from chemistry and make them nutritious. For example, you can determine units of energy to see how many kilojoules make a 100-watt light bulb run for x hours. I determined you can run a 100-watt lightbulb for 640 hours off of one Big Mac. Converting from kcals to joules, of course. The special sauce = calories. Hehe.

I'm also paying a lot of attention to the assumptions of things as we go through them. I want to make sure that the chemistry I learn and the biology I learn have a meaningful impact on the ultimate education for nutrition - that the reasons for science don't eclipse the benefits for humans. I don't want to get so lost in the science that I forget that humans are really who benefit or lose. In the business world I've seen technology and greed usurp the individual too often. Just because we can figure out how to remove diseases from food through adding chemicals and changing properties doesn't mean we've created a great thing.

So my break is over. It's been a break-neck speed week so far and I am ready to try for some sleep - it's a balance of staving off cedar allergies that are primed to attack when I lay down and getting my mind to slow down.

P.S. Don't heat up hydrogen peroxide. I learned today it explodes spectacularly, despite having only one more oxygen molecule than water (H202 vs H20).

Week 1 done

I'm really looking forward to chemistry lab, and tonight was going to be the first one, but there was no lab because it's the first week of class and they are still organizing and need to train us on safety and stuff. So I got to go home after the lecture tonight; no opportunities to blow shit up. It's probably for the best - I feel like hell. The poor girl next to me in chem lecture kept looking at me as if I might detonate. I kept trying not to cough and was turning red, tearing up. I was terrified I was going to cough and shoot one of the cough drops I had perpetually in my mouth across the room. "Teacher Killed by Fisherman's Friend" - I can see the report now.

So week 1 is officially done. Class at least. I have a lot of studying for Monday. Due on Monday: extra credit work for Biology - Dimensional Analysis problems. I also have to study 15 Latin words for our regular Monday Root Quiz. Each week, 15 more words + 5 words from any prior week.

I only need to read 1 chapter in each class however. This seems alien after having had to cram 3-4 chapters per week in my last class. I sort of distrust it. Speaking of which, I finally found out I got a B in Statistics. Nice way to start college again, especially after that speed of light class.

I think the hard part of my classes will be the memorization (I'm pretty bad at this) and the math because it's not a natural way for me to think. I have to find a way to turn my usual familiar logic into this particularly mathematical way of logic to get through Chem (especially) and Bio. But I'm really looking forward to getting deeper into both classes.

Exhausted. Off to bed. Please let me wake up alive tomorrow, slightly more resistant to cedar. Cedar how I hate thee.

Biology and Chemistry

It's on now. I have now had two classes: Chemistry on Tuesday (lecture), and Biology (lab + lecture) tonight. I am excited! I really like both professors, and I think I'm going to do well. The mean age of the students in class is "fresh out of high school" with a few of us old-timers there trying to learn something new.

And some of it is new. Some of it is common sense. My first homework assignment for Chemistry is to read the first chapter and to learn the metric system. For Biology, it's to not blow anything up in lab and to read the first chapter in the huge book. And to never miss a lab. And to learn the metric system.

One of the coolest things both teachers taught us on the first day is the dimensional analysis method - something I wish I'd learned in my first math class because it would have made my math classes afterward SO much easier. It's a form of factoring out units when converting from one unit to another (like years to seconds as in how many seconds in a year or like how many atoms are in glucose). But it makes doing those calculations almost breathtakingly easy.

I have a Chemistry lab and lecture tomorrow and then homework is on for Monday! Labs start in earnest next week. I'll be spending a lot of time in labs looking in microscopes at extremely small things, and combining elements together to make things "react". This is what all boys live for.

It's a pretty big change, going to school, not just for all the school stuff, but just for getting out of the house for a change. I don't care for the frantic drive TO school as I try to migrate from the day's work efforts to the night's learning efforts. But, the drive home at 9pm is pretty quiet and I pass right by downtown, all lit up and beautiful in only the way a big city can be.

Off to try and get some sleep for once. The mountain cedar has been terrible for both Dawn and I the last few days. I swore left and right this morning I had the flu, but it's merely the agony of cedar fever. It really robs the day of its energy and robs the night of clear sequential sleep.

One positive-ish note. I'm likely going to be losing weight going to school - it creates a large buffer in the midst of the day where I can't really eat, and makes me be more proactive about what I eat. Plus all my classes are on the second and third floors of these tall science and administration buildings that I have to scurry to each night as we move from lecture to lab classrooms. And, ultimately, I will be eating out less because I am busy. All this is good. See, school IS good for you.

29 pounds to go.

What can I say? It's been over a month since I promised to post about school and I've already finished one class. It was a beast of a class.

It's not that I don't like statistics. In fact I found it very interesting and extremely useful in processing information in a more mathematical way. But several things impeded my progress at a smooth learning process.

First, it was an accelerated class - 4 months of learning into 4 weeks. This meant two unit tests per week over 2-3 chapters each (there was a print + online test each week). I'm not gifted with math like my friend Janine (whose repeated pleas for leveling to 80 I have had to sacrifice in favor of higher education despite my better judgment - I can't complain, she has a couple of kids, a husband, a job, is in college for accounting, and she lives in Oklahoma - all difficult things).

So, not being gifted in math, my thought in taking an accelerated math class was to get it done with quickly. I also have work right now and I spend the day working and the evenings (usually until 2-ish studying). In retrospect, I should know that for classes I have trouble with I should take more time rather than less. So the initial problem was my faulty American-centric hurry and do it fast approach. Lesson learned.

My own transgression aside, it went downhill from there. This class was over the holiday, so I was able to take the first two tests of unit 1 after an intense first week. The second week was Christmas, so I studied like crazy around holiday cheer but was unable to take the 2nd written unit test because the college testing center closes with the rest of the college for the week between Christmas and New Year.

Week three was terrible because I was learning week 3 stuff (remember, it was over 3 chapters of unfamiliar mathematical formulas) and studying for week 2 stuff (2 chapters) so I could take the tests. On December 29-30 the primary software system we use for lectures, assignments, and online tests underwent regular maintenance - meaning I couldn't access it. Upon their return on December 31, they had a new bug that caused me and many of my classmates to be able to not save about 1 in 5 assignment or test questions and would freeze the system. I'd have to re-do the problem (this sometimes is a 30-minute calculation ordeal). I finally got the week 2 tests done in the late part of week 3, and crammed hard to get back to week 3 as I went into week 4.

Week 4 saw me taking the week 3 tests and catching up with studying for the last 3 chapters of the book. I took the last two tests Wednesday and Thursday this past week. Class over. Whew. On the last day of class, I got an email from the math software company saying they'd fixed the freezing/can't save answers issue. Frakking software industry. That I am currently part of.

The teacher emailed me today and told me that he hadn't received my 4th written test yet from the downtown test center I took it from, so I will temporarily have a "not complete" until he receives and grades it. So for now I don't know what my grade is. I suspect a B somewhere. (Calculating the weighted average is actually something I can do now, but I need grades to do it. My online score - 26% of my grade - is a 99.4%. My first written test was an 85%. The other grades are unknown).

So tonight I am writing because tomorrow it starts again - this time IN class. I start Chemistry 1 tomorrow evening at a classroom on the Eastfield College campus in NE Dallas. Wednesday starts Biology 1, which is a pre-requisite for Anatomy and Physiology. My weeks get busy, but I'll try to write in between homework, work, and that part of the day where sanity is renewed. I've heard legends say that they call it sleep.

Despite the intensity and drama that it sounds like, it's a lot of fun so far and I can't wait for the next classes to start.

30 pounds of schoolbooks

So I have all these books on the floor by my desk. They are school books which arrived this past holiday week. I don't want to talk bad about my last school, but these books seem harder and they are for a community college. Maybe it's the content: Statistics, Nutrition, Biology (this book alone weighs about 10 lbs), and General Chemistry.

All these books are for pre-requisite classes for the curriculum I am eventually working toward. I've been perusing the Nutrition book and it's rather fascinating. I take this as a good sign that I'm looking in the right direction - I can't put the book down and my class doesn't even start until January.

A morsel to chew on, then:

Did you know that your muscles store about 20 minutes of glycogen? Glycogen is the storage form of glucose which is the fuel you get from carbs and fats and stuff. When you are doing a nice steady walk or jog on the treadmill and are breathing a little more intently (but not panting) and are sweating, you are burning off the glycogen for about 20 minutes. After 20 minutes, your body expends all the glycogen and the muscles signal your body to dip into the body fat reserves. This is what most overweight people want.

However, the window of fat reserve usage is fairly small. Fat needs oxygen to convert into energy and if you are working out too hard or too little (like yoga), your body uses other forms of fuel instead of fat reserves. So it seems if you want to lose body fat, you do a better job keeping your heart rate in the aerobic zone and working on duration.

To make it even more fun, when your body creates fat reserves, it does so in quantity and in size. The reason a lot of people lose weight and then gain it back rapidly is because the fat molecules shrink in size but you keep the same number of them. It gets complex here, but your body wants to keep a certain set weight it's comfortable with and will tell fat production to begin again when you enter a non-diet phase, explaining why fat seems to fly back on.

This is only one tiny piece of the puzzle. You should lose weight in certain increments and over certain periods of time to help stabilize these effects. I'll let you know more as I learn more.

Finally, you can't work out a specific area of your body and expect to lose weight right there. Fat is broken down in the bloodstream and pulled from where the chemistry tells it to, not from where you are flexing a muscle. Crunch all you want. Once your fat reserves are at a certain level, then you will lose the one-pack.

Hopefully I got all that right - I haven't even started class yet.

Statistics is first, actually, and I would do well to pre-read that book for this accelerated class which starts December 14. I'm anticipating a 95% probability of passing.

More later!

My cologne smells like some kind of animal

I haven't been writing a lot lately, and it hasn't bothered me much. But every now and then I want to write about my life and that's when the conflicting beliefs rush in. I'm unemployed right now and this suddenly makes public writing seemingly different.

There seem to be several camps of people, and hence corresponding beliefs that when you are unemployed, you should be publicly present in certain ways.

The Professional
For example, there are those former co-workers and family members who advocate 100% professionalism all the time in any post or presence, always. In this scenario, my hair is always freshly cut, I'm clean-shaven, and you can tell I practiced my steely, knowing gaze the whole time I pumped iron for the last 4 hours. My cologne smells like some kind of animal, and I'm ready to engage in this game called professionalism, relentlessly.

The Unprofessional
My natural tendency is to be straightforward and honest. In this scenario, my hair could use a trim, I've got an 8 o'clock shadow, and I've practiced erasing the 'holy shit!' look off my face all day. I did workout for an hour and I spent more time raiding Ulduar than looking for a job. My cologne smells like some kind of flower. A manly flower, yes.

These two belief systems fight a lot. I want to be both, but I don't necessarily have the energy for being "on" all the time (it feels like a lie) when the bent of my nature is to maneuver through this business of unemployment in a more "surprise me" kind of fashion. I also want to be assertive about the next thing I do. So, I sit somewhere in the middle of the Professional and the Unprofessional - this manifests as solitude and quiet, for the moment.

Cologneless
One of the things all this downtime has provided (besides a lot of leet gear) is a slow mental churn of all the jobs I've had. I've gotten past the initial surprise of being on my own again. I got to work with an awesome group of people at the State Bar of Wisconsin. And that warrants a note on it's own: in retrospect, working with them showed me how much I enjoy helping people without the barrier of another company in front of it. That has played very hard into some of the decisions I am now making.

So I've had time to look at all the jobs I've had in a new way. Instead of focusing on the situations (managers never being there, learn by failing, etc), I am looking at the things I've liked about these experiences. I've been doing this, and distilling those "likes" in different ways.

For example, my biggest satisfaction in all my jobs has been helping people. I like to directly help people. From grocery bagging, sweeping floors, working for printers, publishers, and consulting firms, the heartfelt "thank you" from the customer is the big win for me. "This is the best 40-page recommendation document I've read" is equally as satisfying. The paycheck is nice, but that's just to pay the bills. Give me a thanks, and I've felt like I contributed in some way and will walk away smiling.

I also like problem solving. I like delving into technical things, especially business processes and certain computer/technology issues. People always mistake me for a programmer or technical person because I am generally more savvy than they are. But, I am not as technical as say my friends Karen and Chris. At least not in the same way.

Piecing it together
So I've been taking all these things I like about my jobs and applying them to potential jobs. I like parts of the consulting work I've done, but there were distinct things about those jobs that I didn't enjoy. This doesn't mean I won't do them should I be offered another similar position. However, I've been focusing on things I WANT to do as I look for a new job.

I've been working with a dietician to solve my dietary challenges. Interestingly, in working with her, I see the opportunity to meet a lot of the goals I have in a new job. So, I'm exploring what it would take to become a dietician. They work with people directly, they problem-solve varieties of diets and people and processes, and there is an endless supply of people needing their services. I seem to have the right personality fit. So, it's a strong probability. I'm looking into it (without looking at the finances for the moment) -- I am actually working with schools to review the classes and stuff right now.

A note about resumes
In this pursuit of a job, I've had a ton of feedback about resumes. The current trend is to make sure that I make the resume fit the job, and I have an issue with this. On NPR last night, a recruiter was saying to look at the keywords in the job description and match your resume to fit it.

I admit I have an old-style resume that lists what I DID rather than what I CAN DO. I need to change that. But, I have a distinct problem with making my resume sound exactly like the job description if I'm not able to do it or am almost qualified. They tell me not to lie on a resume, but then ask me to lie by stating what they want me to hear. How does that ensure a good fit with me and a potential company?

My sense of customer service says that you work honestly with each other. Sure, there's a game to play, always, but I am for minimizing that game. I'm contemplating the part in the play that a resume acts - if it's ok to "lie" for the sake of getting an in. But, I don't like it. I think it sets up a situation to fail.

At the end of the day, I'm just trying to figure it all out. I can be the professional - I do good work, I have solid skills, and I like to work and be useful to other people. My cologne is the wild cat on those days, the Lion of my birth month. But on the other days, I don't always know, and I probably need a shower. Recognizing the two halves of the whole - and accepting them, rather than fighting with them may let the hunt be successful.

My odds are improving

Wow!

Today I saw my 2nd shuttle lift-off live, on my 4th attempt. It was astonishing.

We started the day at 4am and left the hotel at 5:15am to drive 11 miles to Kennedy Space Center. They opened at 5:30 on this special day - launch day - and we only spent a little while waiting outside in a tired stupor.

We had breakfast with an astronaut at 7:30am (Mark C. Lee, who worked on Hubble once before and was the first man to have an untethered spacewalk - he used a jet pack). We got a photo op with him afterward and then went to see a IMAX movie to kill some time before we had to board the buses to the causeway where we were going to watch the shuttle lift off.

We got a quick lunch in after the movie and then stood in line waiting for the buses to be cleared for departure. Finally, after baking a while, they were. It's about 15 minutes out to the NASA causeway.

The causeway is just a road going over the water, and there's a little dip enough for thousands and thousands of people to sit and watch. It's 6 miles from the launch pad and the closest place non-VIP people can be. There's a relatively unimpeded view of the launch pad - only a small island with some trees slightly obscuring the shuttle. But you can see the orange top of the external tank and some of the rocket boosters in the distance.

We waited about 2 hours in the sun - it was SO hot. But, it was just fun to listen to everyone and watch the crowd. After about an hour I wandered around to stretch the legs and found a much better location that had speakers right next to it. They pipe in the engineering/flight director talk over this and that helps us know what is going on, so we moved to that area.

There was a brief 30 minutes or so of concern as they saw some ice build-up on the connection from the external tank (that holds liquid helium and hydrogen at around -400 degrees) to the orbiter. They decided it wasn't a concern. We also watched some big clouds build up (on the ride home they became thunderstorms, but during countdown it was not an issue). Nevertheless at T-20 minutes, then T-9 minutes, all was go for launch.

The last 9 minutes goes by really rapidly. The entire crowd, which has been chattering for hours suddenly goes silent and the flight director's voice over the loudspeakers is especially clear. You hear the different things happening - retracting the crew arm, starting the auxiliary power units, removing the beany cap. About a minute after the APUs start (T-5 minutes), we could hear a low grumble roll across the causeway - these are the APUs starting up. They are very loud.

Everything takes on this unreal feeling as you go into the last 2 minutes. It's eerily quiet except for the occasional voice over the speakers: "90 seconds".... "60".... "30 seconds, we have auto-sequence start". And then it's just holding your breath.

We could hear the 10 second countdown over the speakers as the igniters beneath the engine engaged, and then the "we have liftoff", and then you could see in the distance the steam rising from the little tiny area where the orange cone is, obscuring it. And then there's a bright fire as the shuttle leaps off the pad. The TV does not do this justice by any means: it is a solar fire, four times the length of the shuttle, and it's like the shuttle climbs this bright flame up.

The crowd cheers wildly: we can see, just over there, Atlantis lifting off, and arcing to the east in a very deliberate climb, long steam trail following the burning fire. It's about 40 seconds after liftoff and a subsonic sounds reaches you from the launch pad and climbs up the trail so recently occupied by fire. You can feel it in your heart, in the ground, in your body. It's a huge rumble that begins to echo across the water and ascends into a great crackling atmospheric vibration that you feel in your whole body.

Without expensive cameras and binoculars, the shuttle is gone in about 3 minutes. You realize the flight controllers are still talking about the status of the engines and trajectory. So there's nothing to do but board the bus and head back to the center. Still, you board the bus changed, and moved, and astonished.

And so we made our way back to Titusville, satisfied and glad for a clean launch... tired, happy, ready to have two days of vacation not shuttle-related. We're a little dazed. It's 1 part tired, 1 part hot, 1 part oh my god.

Be sure to check out my pictures on Facebook. I'll send you a link if you email me or comment. I also have about 3 minutes of video - from T-30 to T+2:30, with the flight controllers talking and the crackling in the sky.