a brief note to congratulate my little brother peter, who is about to embark on a year at nuclear power school in charleston, s.c. apparently he'll be dealing with stuff like this:

"Twenty k is 2R and 20k in parallel with 20k is 10k," says the man in a white lab coat, scribbling on a chalkboard as fast as he talks. Twenty-five students look on, seemingly absorbed. "To determine the voltage out we consider that the step is Vin over 3R, times one half to the N, times feedback resistance. N is equal to the number of nodes slash digits; therefore, the Vstep is equal to (Vin/3R)(1/2)n(RFB). Based on that, who knows what the step voltage is?"

A dozen hands go up. For these young men and women - students at the Naval Nuclear Power Command, Charleston, S.C. - the gibberish is decipherable; for them, digital to analog conversion is easy. They could do it in their sleep.

...err. yeah...fun times! i'll be sure to visit him down at the beach when i'm frozen blue from a chicago winter.

the governess pointed out the fun of googlism the other day, so i tried it out myself. guessing game: which of the following is actually in reference to me (and my first and last names that i will not publish on the internets though it's rather useless by now because photos and incriminating stories about me are effing everywhere)?

...is country officer on yugoslavia and albania for the republican institute for international affairs
...is a 8
...is a first year who finally overcame her feelings of inferiority with twelve nipple rings and an eyeball stud
...is an inspirational artist

answer is a blast from the past in the form of my 18 year-old writing style!

goddammit. just realized that link contains my full name, as well being totally embarrassing. oh well!

my dilemma on this particular day: to buy or not to buy these lovely black leather flat-heeled boots from bruno magli. internal debate follows:

no: boots cost $200
yes: boots are actually 50% off, and will revert back to even more cost-prohibitive state come friday.

no: idiot, you own 1700 pairs of boots
yes: but none of them are flat-heeled. you need a different heel for every occasion, you see. duh.

no: you really can't afford these, you really don't need these, and you are just feeling sorry for yourself because you are going to have part of your boob cut out at a date yet to be determined.
yes: you are going to have part of your boob cut out at a date yet to be determined. boob cuttage. good enough, i think. (don't worry, it's mostly likely nothing and is 90% being done just to reassure me that it is, indeed, likely nothing. but still. that other 10%, plus family history, plus my general anxiety levels=not fun. plus, BOOB CUTTING. and i have really lovely boobs. i mean, i like to think so. it doesn't help that they've been felt up and down by, like, sixteen women in the past two weeks. trust me, it's not hot.)

anyway, will update you on forthcoming decision (and of course, later on on the boob cutting thing). i think self-pity and bootlust will win out on this one.

UPDATE: aaaand, the boots are MINE. photos of them to come once they are delivered, along with photos of the awesome mixer that tommy bought me last week, because i am the most spoiled person on earth and he is the best boyfriend ever (except now he is able to demand that i bake cookies for him at the drop of a hat).

take a look at this woman:

i want you all to take guesses in the comments as to why she's notorious before i reveal the stunning truth behind the cut.

During my freshman summer I took a job as an intern at a family friend's DC-area dot-com company. I learned about web programming and databases, and with the motley crew of 7 or 8 fulltime employees, indulged the founder's dreams of internet glory. Alan, a prolific but messy programmer, shat out millions of lines of code that no one else tracked or read. The servers quickly became littered with half-finished auction, mass mail, spot market, survey, bulletin board and other applications. Various business associations were lined up -- look, bakers! You can buy flour from each other! Look, asphalt manufacturers! You can share your thoughts on asphalt production! It's only 1998, and it's ALREADY THE FUTURE.

I came back the next summer, and the next. The staff swelled, then shrank, then shrank some more. Alan left. A room in the office was sublet to someone else, then all of the rooms but two. Then the office moved to the end of the metro. At no point did the underlying code change, except to be given a new coat of electronic paint. The same shitty technology -- now also hopelessly outdated -- was bundled together with tape and marketed to clueless and/or deeply corrupt foreign nationals passing through Washington with an eye toward blowing their country's economic development budget.

Now, every 8 or 12 months, I get urgent, ego-stroking phone calls asking me to fix things. There hasn't been an actual programmer on staff in several years. It's always something incredibly urgent, with a short timeframe -- having tried to sell the client on not really needing, say site search for the last couple of months, they've grown anxious.

I really hate being put in this position. He knows I'm grateful for being given a start, and that I know the systems, and that I'm available on the ad-hoc basis that lets him continue to limp along. I know I'm being taken advantage of, and it pisses me off. But how do you tell a family friend, kinda-smarmy though he may be, that it's long since time to flush his company down the toilet? That his technical assets are worthless, and he has no one on staff with knowledge of any technologies less than a decade old. They're still running Windows NT, for god's sake.

Sigh. I guess it's time to write a stern "ok, but this is really the last time" email. I'm such a goddamn sucker. Maybe if I refuse to take any money for it he'll get the message.