Archive for October, 2005
www.netvibes.com is my new homepage. I dump my RSS feeds here, google search here, keep my to-do list right on there… ach, it is lovely. Now I want to understand the technology behind it.
After Suzanne’s singing audition (she’s directing a lovely Rachmaninoff vocal piece that I cannot spell the name of), I barricaded myself in my room today, leaving only to take out the trash and briefly watch Mary Poppins in my suite lounge. Once in a while, a little isolation is good.
I’m nearly done reading McLuhan’s Understanding Media, which is mildly old-fashioned in tone and content but has some interesting insights anyway. McLuhan was, as I understand it, the first person to study the effect that media (clocks, newspapers, phones, telegraphs, radio, the lightbulb) has on society rather than focusing on the content they transmit. “The medium is the message” was a phrase coined by that book. Reading it is like listening to a grand-uncle tell you the discoveries of his old days by the fireside; you nod and smile politely on occasion, but it’s genuinely interesting stuff for the most part. For instance, McLuhan classifies media as “Hot” or “Cold,” depending on how involved they make the individual feel. Does a media make a society more individualist (radio) or more tribal (print)? What does it mean for the social structure when information suddenly flows orders of magnitude faster than it ever has before? I think McLuhan would have gotten a kick out of the internet. I wonder if someone’s written an equivalent book for the modern age.
One thing that came up in conversation when Chris and I were driving back from Bikes Not Bombs on Friday is the idea of just… living. Which I’ve never done. I spent my entire teenage life away from home working my brains out in magnet schools (IMSA and Olin). I’m not entirely sure where my childhood went. I had fun, but… well, math textbooks aren’t entirely subsitutes for normal 12-year-old peer companionship. Between the ages of 14 and 19, I celebrated a grand total of one birthday at home, and that was only because I decided not to go to prom. I’ve never gone on a random road trip or seen a good night sky. I’ve never biked past the borders of my town or had a crush or pulled a large-scale prank. I have cried, for very short periods of time before regaining control, finding a solution, and laughing for real again, in front of a grand total of two people who were not my parents (and I a small child).
I have never really let myself be vulnerable to anything. (Even the act of writing these words in this blog, which might make some people vulnerable, does not make me uncomfortable, because I see it as an objective analysis, a sort of self-audit, and not particularly a revelation.)
There have been moments where I know I’ve lived: I’ve danced in the dark on a frozen lake, sat on an ice-covered tree for hours, played soccer in a warm downpour, and yelled poetry into a blizzard because it felt like the right thing to do at the moment. I live when I design, when I teach, and when I learn about lovely ideas like I mentioned in a previous post. I have painted cardboard armor and run down the hall in war stripes and played guitar in string-blistered fingers. But even now, too much of my time is spent attempting to observe life and analyze it rather than participate in it.
I don’t take my academics obsessively seriously, and I have a lot of fun with what I do, but I’ve never actually stopped and had time to have a life, had space to have a life, or let myself… have a life. No overloaded classes, no crazy job, no family obligations. Just kind of being there. Appreciating things. Reading good books. Eating good food (when have I last cooked a full dinner from scratch with truly good ingredients?) Going where I want to go when I want to go there. I’ve always sold my time to somebody else, and I don’t want to any more. I need a vacation. A very long vacation. *slips on ring of power, vanishes*
Kidding aside, I do need to take some time to step back and be still and quiet for a while. Knowing me, “still and quiet” means going off on some ballistic rampage quest o’ fun, but the lack of obligations, attachment, and responsibility are what I”m going for. I’d like to take a year between Olin and whatever-comes-after-Olin to do something for myself. Options include volunteering somewhere like City Year, the Peace Corps (I know that’s two years), Teach For America, shipping myself off to China or biking to Mexico or heading to the Philippines to do what I can, or sticking around Boston and trying to find something.
There’s also the idea of heading across the country on a low-budget tour to learn about the American educational system. I’d like to write a book. I’d like to watch classrooms, see how they’re being taught, see how local, state, and federal mandates affect education, see how they’re supported. Talk to teachers, talk to students, talk to parents, administrators, government officials. How does a country help its children grow into good adults? What’s out there? What’s going on? It’s a vague idea, and I’d need to find a more specific focus for it, not to mention a way to feasibly carry it out well.
I’m far too much of a dreamer for my own good.
If you have built castles in the air, your work need not be lost; that is where they should be.
Now put foundations under them.
-Thoreau
Sunday, October 30th, 2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
There’s nothing like a nonfunctional laptop power cord to make you realize how dependent you are on it (and how much it limits your motion to be plugged in). I’ll talk to IT tomorrow morning. In other words, I’m seriously considering getting a PocketPC, a Palm, or something else handheld - my laptop is great, but sometimes I just need… a small computing thing that syncs with Outlook and has wireless. I think the battery would last longer on those, too. (I can just imagine people with handhelds laughing at me now. “The fool! She thinks they have good battery life…”)
It was not altogether a terrible day, by which I mean it was actually quite nice. The Wellesley book fair is awfully tempting to be at, especially when stuff is going at $5 a bag. Frell yeah. I hadn’t planned on going until Karen and Beth showed up at my door, but now I have a sack of educational psychology books I didn’t have before, along with such classics as Hume’s “An Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding” and a Bible (New American - the official Catholic translation). I should actually read, with good depth and seriousness, the central book of the religion I was raised in. I also got a translation of the Book of Job, which is one of my favorites because of the way it hits home. It hits home painfully, but it hits.
There’s also an old, slim copy of Romeo and Juliet in the bag. I have to finish writing that Rhomeo and Julihat script from freshman year, and this will hopefully provide impetus. I want to have it complete before the seniors graduate. I shudder at sappy things, but I actually love some of the passages in there between Romeo and Juliet; they’re beautifully written and not just gratituous sugar. Sometimes that’s how I feel about math and other beautiful ideas in math and science. I think Shakespeare captures the reverent awe very well.
But soft! What flux through yonder plane doth break? It is the E, and Julihat is the source!
When I understand a deep idea for the first time, the feeling I get is kind of what I imagine other people feel like when they fall in love with a person. Except this is a more distant and sort of reverent awe, a walking around with your feet floating off because you’re seeing that concept everywhere you look. The first time I saw calculus, it happened. When I understood the evolution of the monetary system (when the phrase “time is money” began to truly make sense), it happened too. When I learned about formal visual balance in artistic compositions, I ran around framing the world between my fingers. When I learned there was more than one kind of infinity. When I saw that integrators and differentiators weren’t just calculus concepts. I don’t need alcohol because I can get drunk on ideas.
The appreciation of that sort of beauty used to be my subsitute for people. It still is my subsitute for people when I don’t know what to do in a social situation or when I’m afraid of venting something that’ll become a burden to someone else. Books are very safe friends. When you read them, nothing changes between you and them.
End that tangent. Then we had our first Better Bags meeting for Team CHASM (Chris, Herbert, Andrew, Stephen, and Mel; it works out nicely) during which we brainstormed (”Let’s have tiny ninjas cart their groceries home!”) and then headed to Whole Foods to observe customers. And, er, do some shopping. I brought back rice cakes, jam, and salmon patties.
Revelation of the day: Shopping bags can actually hold up to 60 lbs without breaking at all.
Second revelation: Anything beyond 20 lbs in a grocery bag is really uncomfortable to carry for an appreciably long period of time.
Conclusion: People totally underload grocery bags.
Sunday, October 30th, 2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
How to have a good Saturday:
1. Stay up reading and talking to friends ’till 6.
2. Wake up - no alarm - at 10am. Decide blankets are warm. Snuggle back inside bed.
3. Wake up - no alarm - at noon. Decide blankets are still warm, and very comfortable. Re-nap.
4. Wake up - no alarm - at 2pm - to big, fat snowflakes drifting slowly down from the sky. Rejoice, take a hot shower, and lounge until you
5. Go to dinner at your aunt’s house and play with small children.
(to be completed shortly)
6. Returning from dinner, have some good productive work time until
7. ExpressO jamming practice with Kristen and Eric, followed by
8. More happy productivity that makes a huge dent in your to-do list.
9. Hot tea and conversations, then
10. More sleep.
Saturday, October 29th, 2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
After drilling plywood for several hours, Chris and I finished up the aluminum crate for Bikes Not Bombs and got back on campus at 8:30, an hour later than usual. I love volunteering at BNB; there’s something great about the rumpledness of the shop, the hackishness of what we do, the grease and sawdust that find their way into your hair, your clothes, everything. We also got another old steel bike frame for our matsci project.
Anyway, this made me late for our Batman costume prep. Suzanne was Batgirl, Mark was Batman, I was Robin, and Andrew was The Riddler. Considering our costumes consisted entirely of a mad scramble to the garment district, a trip to Jo-Ann’s Fabric, and a last minute hack, they were beautiful. I’m biased, but really - you need to see for yourself. If I get pictures, I’ll post them. Apparently with my hair parted and gelled, my glasses off, and a mask on, I look like a teenage boy (says Jeff and Alex). To appease them (and stop scaring Alex off), my hair is now very rumpled (still gelled, no longer parted) and my glasses are back on.
There were even more awesome costumes at the dance. Notables include the Winnie The Pooh group which had something like 30 people, Joe with a crowbar and a Half Life costume, Brian and Dan as a prox card and reader, Kat (resistor), Kristen (diode), Simon and Eric VW (capacitor), and Gallimore (PCB) as a circuit, and Jon Tse as Mark Chang (the resemblance was eerie). I go to the Halloween dance to see the costumes, anyway. The actual dance + music + crowdingness part isn’t something I enjoy all that much.
I have trouble functioning in normal society’s recreational activities, particularly parties and dances. I have a hard time having fun with no point. Not that I think dances and parties are worthless, because they definitely let people blow off steam. It’s just that I don’t really feel like I fit in them. You know what it’s like when you belong somewhere, but you don’t just quite fit there? It’s like being a puzzle piece wandering around looking for its spot. It’s somewhere there; it’s definitely part of the picture - it’s just not… in it yet.
So what do you do then? Make your own fun! After I upload my HFID homework, it’s off to the lounge to sit in on the last half of Shrek.
Friday, October 28th, 2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
10 years ago . . .
- Cried because the first English paper I really let myself write was so different from everyone else’s. (This is the paper that gave me the pseudonym “Mouse.”)
- Had never heard of abstract math before; I thought calculus was just a more complicated form of multiplication that was Really Hard for grownups and that I shouldn’t even dream of tackling it yet.
- Started piano lessons with Mrs. Budilovsky, who taught me over the next five years what it really means to play music.
- Took home the maximum number of books allowed from the school library every day and read them all after dinner every night instead of going over to friends’ houses most of the time.
- Didn’t hang out with the girls much at recess. I played football, wall-ball, and chicken (wrestle your opponent off the monkey bars while hanging from them yourself) with the boys instead.
5 years ago . . .
- Improvised in front of a stage of people for the first time at Pseudo.
- Played the cello every day in orchestra; had stopped playing piano, and was too afraid to sing.
- Carried a sketchbook in my backpack continuously and drew in it every spare moment. Became known as “The Kid Who Does Art.”
- Taught for the first time. Fell in love with teaching.
- Was (at 14) the “kid sister” to all my IMSA friends, who formed a somewhat protective (if eccentric) family.
1 year ago . . .
- Slept in a cave behind Kristen’s desk.
- Worked all night most nights in the 4N nook grading ICB papers, doing homework, and arguing with Alex and Mark.
- Wrote my first a capella arrangement.
- Decided to become an ECE by using the Dartboard Method of major-picking. (Seriously.)
-
Yesterday I . . .
- Slept through my morning classes for the last time this illness
- Went to the first two user interviews for the human-powered vehicles team
- Started work with Team CHASM on a sustainable grocery bags competition (BetterBags)
- Found that kielbasa and cornbread are a great lunch combo
- Was only supposed to be in more than one place simulatenously twice
Friday, October 28th, 2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Wow. Planet Olin is awesome. I’ll cave to the meme.
20 things you probably don’t know
20. I was on the verge of going to art school three years ago. I’ve actually got an IM conversation recorded in which I tell a friend “Oh, I’m pretty sure I’m going to a liberal arts school - there’s no way I could actually study math, or science, or anything like that…”
19. I was born with perfect hearing, but traded it off in order to survive a bout of pneumonia at age 2. It took three more years for my parents to realize I couldn’t hear high frequencies any more. They then worried that I would fall behind.
18. I had a sign language interpreter from 3rd to 8th grade. Despite this, I can still not carry on a fluent conversation in ASL.
17. There are only three things I wish I could hear. Consonants (in spelling bees, I had to continually ask for definitions and whether words were plural or singular, since I can’t hear the ’s’ at the end of plural words), the melodies in flute concertos, and birds. I don’t mind playing the right hand of the piano by sight - I transpose it down an octave the first few times I practice, and then things are fine.
Right, so enough talking about my ears.
16. My parents speak English, Tagalog, Fookien, and Mandarin to each other at home. Trouble is they speak them all at the same time. Consequently, I speak… English.
15. As a small child, I once asked Santa Claus for a precalculus textbook for Christmas. By the end of January, I had finished reading it.
14. My favorite Filipino dish is diniguan, or “Pork blood soup,” which sounds gross but tastes wonderful. (My family immigrated from China to the Philippines, then from there to the US.)
13. There’s a betting pool among my high school friends as to when I will have my first boyfriend and my first beer. Answers range from “freshman year at college” to “never.” Currently, “never” is in the lead.
12. However, Tesch and I pulled an April Fools prank on my high school buddies our first year at Olin, wherein we managed to convince the folks back home in IL that I was dating him, thereby massively freaking them out. It was wonderful.
11. I have never TA’d a class beyond the middle school level in which all my students were younger than I was at the time (I have been a TA since high school).
10. I have a small brother. His name is Jason and he’s 2.5 years younger. He hasn’t actually been smaller than me since he was nine or so.
9. When I was in middle school, I was convinced for some reason that I would never live past the age of 19. I hope I was wrong.
8. My mother is a retired dentist. To her chagrin, I have had more cavities and dental work than any other child in my extended family. (To be fair, the extended bout of pneumonia left the enamel of my then-developing adult teeth severely weakened.)
7. My father works for a medical supply company. He once dressed up as Captain Electrode to make a presentation to his sales reps. I have a photo of him next to my brother and myself as children, striking a noble pose dressed in a mask, a cape, and a gigantic thunderbolt insignia.
6. I once tried to use cold cream to condition my hair because the ad copy on all the shampoo bottles was telling me that “moisturizing” was good. It took several rinses with dishwashing detergent to get it all out. More than ten years later, I am still extremely skeptical of beauty products. (Then there was the time I shaved my forehead because I’d heard that women shaved but couldn’t figure out what they shaved…)
5. My laptop used to have a painting of a phoenix on it. Then it collided with a falling desk backstage during a play.
4. Before we got a closed-captioned television, I used to sneak downstairs at 6:30am every morning to watch TV. I muted the sound and lipread the actors so I wouldn’t wake my parents.
3. Until I was 15, I had no idea that you could learn to program computers; I thought it was highly specialized work that required a PhD or something (my family wasn’t incredibly computer-literate).
2. When I was 12, I told my mother that when I got married (if I got married), it wasn’t going to be in a dress. White tennis shoes, white t-shirt, jeans - and no flowers. At this point, my father encouraged me to become a nun (I was raised Catholic).
1. I once spray-painted my sneakers black so I wouldn’t have to wear dress shoes to a dance.
Wednesday, October 26th, 2005 | Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
I spent about half an hour last night picking stiches out of a polarfleece jacket to turn it into a vest. For the record, polarfleece jackets are sewn together with no less than three rows of stitches, all done in a different way; they’re a bit of a pain. On the other hand, my halloween costume is almost done now.
The book that Kristen gave me for Christmas, Once Upon A Number, got me thinking about how technical nontechnical stuff is and how nontechnical technical stuff can be. In the weirdest, fuzziest, most emotional and qualitative human reactions, there’s some underlying mathematical model. (Why do people buy SUV’s? Game theory’s minimax.) In the hardest-nosed, most black-and-white math possible, there’s all sorts of personal baggage. (Newton vs. Liebniz in the development of calculus, the ways statistics are pitched as legal evidence in a courtroom…)
Last night’s Social Justice Reading Group started me thinking about the balance between our duty to try to change the world to our version of “good” and our duty to accept the version that others have of “goodness.” Do we tolerate intolerance? If we don’t think anybody should be able to enforce their way of thinking on anybody else, aren’t we enforcing non-enforcement? How do you change the world without being either very narrowly focused or a hypocrite in some way?
I think the answer has something to do with changing ourselves first before trying to transform others. The trouble is that we’ll never be perfect ourselves.
Wednesday, October 26th, 2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
I’ve been getting an amazing amount of sleep lately. Usually I can wake up after 4 hours and be nice and refreshed, but since I got sick, I’ve been pulling 7, 8 hours a night. I can feel my health drastically improving after each very long sleep, though; when I was sick and pulling 2, 3 hours a night, my lungs were miserable. Now I can climb a flight of stairs and not start wheezing phlegm! This also means that soon I’ll be able to go back to 3-5 hours a night, since I think I’ll be better in a few days (and won’t need healing time further). Ah, immune systems. How I love thee.
On the other hand, the lost productivity from being sick last week is going to take a little longer to fix. I feel sort of bad for my ECS tutorials - just when they need the most (right before orals), I’m least able to give it. I’ve been pretty out of it for the last week or so, and completely not teaching up to snuff. Must fix. Hyarr.
Thanks to a mini-project Natalie and I did for Bio last year, whenever I sleep I think of my brain being bathed in a happy, calming fluid. The synaptic clefts between neurons are filled with conductive seratonin when you’re awake, but it accumulates charge over time and the signals in your brain start transmitting messages strangely as a result (noisy signal). When you fall into deep sleep, nonconductive melatonin replaces the seratonin, giving your neurons a chance to rest; when you wake up, a new round of seratonin replaces the melatonin, and you’re good to go again. At least that’s how I understand it. This would explain sleep inertia and why you think differently when you’re really sleep-deprived. I’m frustrated by the lack of completion of this picture, though; where does the seratonin go (is it metabolized? does it drain off somewhere? eh?) and from whence does it come, and the same for the melatonin? Where, for that matter, do the electrical impulses that travel through our brains originate - what yields the actual electrons to kick off that first tiny surge of current?
Traveling further off topic, how does something become encoded into muscle memory? I don’t have to think of hitting keys as I’m typing this post, but I did when I was 7 (and when I was 14 and learning dvorak). How do short-term memories transfer into long term ones, and where are memories stored? I need to abandon my metaphor of brain as a computer; I realize it’s a terribly restrictive one and blinds me to much more - but I have a hard time going with no metaphor at all. All my understanding and explanations are stored in terms of stories; I’m trying to find an alternative file format (see, the analogy again).
Idle thought: I wonder what Olin expected of me when I first got here. When they read my application, what did they think I’d be like? (What on earth posessed them to admit me?) What did they think I’d do? Have I met those expectations, or am I a disappointment (or, at least, not quite what they expected)?
I’m really typing this blog to stall on the grading I should be doing. Bad Mel. No cookie. Finish grading now. There we go.
Monday, October 24th, 2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
Parents’ Weekend without the parents today. I slept past my alarm (I vaguely remember turning it off with a “five more minutes” thought in my head) and was woken by a knocking that was indicative of my lack of presence at OVE’s pre-rehearsal. With a slightly phlegmmy throat and almost no warming up, I somehow didn’t mess up the entire Alto section of “Build Me Up Buttercup” in our (mostly in-tune, mostly together, but extremely exhausted-sounding) performance. So that went well.
I was somewhat more awake for the UOCD presentation, which I do think went quite well. There were lots of parents there (!) that asked lots of questions (!) and stayed afterwards to talk to us (!!!). We’re getting better at this impromptu-presentation thing.
Question of the day: Do we accomodate different learning styles and modalities as much as we should? (At Olin? In general?)
Saturday, October 22nd, 2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments »
The New England Mobile Book Fair is a beautiful place. I picked up a book on Tai Chi and John Forester’s Effective Cycling for dirt cheap. I’m actually getting more enthralled by bicycles the longer I spend with them - they’re wonderfully mechanical, biomechanical, manufacturing-happy, and useful in so many different ways. Carl, the guy who runs Bikes Not Bombs, is awesome. He really knows how to work well with volunteers, get you involved, let you really do something. I need to learn how to mentor like that.
Had a neat talk with Allen today about the availability of census data and our (Andrew’s, now expanded to Mark and myself) idea to make statistical information easier for the general public (but more specifically, policy researchers, debaters, and the like) to access.
Thanks to my rash of bloody noses for the past few weeks, my favorite set of bedsheets (mostly the pillowcase) is now permanently stained with ugly brown spots. Or maybe not permanently. I shall have to see. I mean, there are a lot of solvents out there.
Supposedly the play was great - I got back late from BNB, helped set up the food (I’m supposed to be an usher), got some food and missed the first half of the selling-of-the-food, and… generally tried very hard to make myself useful, although I don’t think I actually was. But I did what I could. And Mark finally gave me his copy of the script so I could read it and follow the dialogue for tomorrow. So now I’ve read it, I have my pre-closed-captioning in my brain, and I shall be able to enjoy the show. Thank you, Mark. (It took you long enough!)
Vow: I shall be more utilitarian for the musical. I harbor a secret desire to try out because - well, I’ve never really done anything on the stage, just stuff behind it - but I know that I am not that great at acting, singing, and dancing, all three of which are required in some amount for a musical. I could probably do something, but I would be much more useful doing… props. Or music. Or something I am better at. I don’t know - there seems to be this “drama-ness” that makes theatre or acting good or bad, and for the most part, I’m unable to pick up on it.
Phone conversation with the mother today. Apparently I need to act more feminine and let boys do more things for me, like pay for dinner, or ask me to the Snow Ball. (”You should take advantage of being a girl.” “Mom, I armwrestle people for the check.”)
In the same conversation, she’s commenting on how much my little brother (who’s sixteen) has to spend on his date for homecoming (lots). This is, by the way, fulfilling one of my predictions from elementary school - namely that Jason will go on a date before I do. (Right, so it’s not a date-date, but he’s taking a girl to a dance, and this counts in my book.) Yes, I’m 2.5 years older than him.
Disclaimer: My parents are really cool and supportive and not gender-role-y (heck, they loved that I was going into engineering). However, they are my parents. And they’re conservative, Catholic, and Chinese. So.
This is not my life plan:
0. Grow up
1. Settle down
2. Marry a nice Catholic Chinese boy
3. Have nice Catholic Chinese children
4. The end
I wonder just how much my family (extended, too) worries about my eligibility for marriage in the future. To nice Catholic Chinese boys, of course. Of which there are lots in the United States.
Right.
Then again, if I’m wondering how much they worry, they’re making me think about it, thus rendering any “Make Mel think about BOYS! like other girls her age” plans successful in the end. Henceforth, end conversation on topic in this post.
DENIM is a spiffy prototyping system - it’s basically “Sketch your webpages! Whee! Make your images into HTML! Whee!” It’s not Photoshop with lots of tables, though; it’s actually designed for graphics tablet users and lets you show the link relationships between several pages as well. It’s kind of like incredibly limited paper prototyping for webpages. I’d love to examine prototyping tools. You could do a whole semester worth of IS on that. DJ and I might just do that.
Just found out that Blinder needs a sub for the UOCD speech for Parents’ Weekend tomorrow, so Andrew drafted Mark and myself to help him out (why? I don’t know). We hacked together a skit. Mark’s a user, Andrew’s an Engineer, and I’m an Olin Engineer. Script I just wrote runs something like this… (we won’t necessarily use it)
The Script
/AC209, Olin College. The room is full, the lights are on, and ANDREW, 20 and very professional-looking, stands at the front, addressing the audience. Several chairs are placed at the front of the room between Andrew and the door./
Andrew:
/As he speaks, MARK, 20, and under the burden of accumulated sleep debt, comes in and starts carrying the chairs out, one at a time. He’s clearly not thrilled about this job. As he turns to remove the first chair, we see a sign labeled “USER” on his back.
/Andrew: Aha! An opportunity! (To Mark) You, sir, have a problem. I am a highly-trained engineer; I will fix it. Here.
/And with that, he snatches Mark’s hand, measures it several times with a tiny ruler, and dashes out of the room as Mark stands slightly stunned. Machining noises from offstage, Andrew rushes back in with a prototype in his hand, and…
/Andrew: There you go. Automatic chair tracker, should solve all your problems, no need to thank me, you’re very welcome, good-bye.
/Strolls off, very pleased with himself. As he turns away, we can see there’s a sign labeled “ENGINEER” on his back. Mark pokes skeptically at the newfangled gadget, sighs, hands it to an audience member, and continues moving chairs. On his way out with the next chair, he almost collides with MEL flying in through the door. She’s mildly hyperactive from having stayed up late writing a script the night before. Pinned to the back of her shirt is a sign labeled “OLIN ENGINEER.”
/Mel: Mark, what are you doing? Go back to sleep.
Mark: I can’t. I’ve got to move these chairs down to the auditorium for the play tonight. .
Mel: Huh. Would it be easier if we built something to help you move all these chairs?
Mark: Not really. This is a one-time thing to set up the auditorium. The real pain is getting all the actors in the same place at the same time. Or all your singers, for that matter.
Mel: How do you do that now?
Mark: Call them, email them, hope they show up.
Mel /scribbling on post-its and sticking them copiously to the walls/: What if you had something that’d let you gather your singers together fast? Like a handheld… pager thing. /She begins scratching out things on the whiteboard./
Mark (as Mel draws): That’d be nice. A big “ACTORS COME HERE NOW” button - yeah, that’s good. It doesn’t need a volume control; I can talk loudly. Can you make it telepathic?
Mel: I’m… pretty sure that’s beyond our technological capabilities, but how about an automatic notification for rehearsals you’ve already scheduled?
Mark: Okay. As long as it tells me when it’s doing that. And then…
/Reenter ANDREW, all action halts. Insert further spiel here./
It’s late.
I need to do the bedtime thing early tonight. Ahh. Bedtime.
Friday, October 21st, 2005 | Uncategorized | No Comments »