Thursday, March 20, 2008

Thursday afternoon

Wow! What a miracle! This post is being written at 4:51 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon. This was made possible by the Indiana county courthouse closing at 4:30 p.m. Since this is the same time as I finish work, I had to leave at 4 p.m. today just to get across town in time to squeeze in the half-page Indiana voter registration form. Somehow I got behind several slow vehicles (read: 5 mph below the speed limit) and in the way of several police cars (read: 3), but still made it. Whew. The polling notification should arrive in plenty of time for Indiana's relatively late May primary.

And so, here I am stuck at the library, one and a half hours before Chinese lessons begin, with nothing but Internet, thousands of books and my latest Chinese notes. Help. I think I'm going to die of boredom!

Saturday, March 15, 2008

Ironic = Frustrating or Very Hilarious

Imagine this: You rent a nice little apartment but don't have Internet there.

One day, you discover you can get a wireless signal and even the password. You try everything you can think of with your wireless card, but cannot get on.

You just might need some updates for your wireless card.

Someone gives you the download information for these updates, and you go visit a friend who has Internet to download them.

At first you cannot get on your friend's Internet like usual. It takes you quite a while to figure out what you did to it earlier while trying to get on the other network, but finally, --- well, before you figure it out, it turns out that just wiping out and resetting fixes everything.

You get back to your place and happily mess around with installing the new updates. Unfortunately, they don't seem to work.

You pass this information on to your technical expert, who emails you a link for a new download. However, you are not at your own computer, so...

...You go back to visit your friend with the Internet again, in order to get the new download. Unfortunately, whatever you did to your wireless card while installing the new updates that did not work for it at your place apparently have made it not work anywhere.

You are definitely stuck between a big rock and a very hard place, because to try to get On at your place, you have to get On somewhere else to get important new stuff, but you can't get On somewhere else because you're trying to get On at your place. Not to mention that you never know, when you leave one place, what the On status at the other place will be.

How can life be so ironic and so funny!

Saturday, March 01, 2008

Manual: How to Set Up Sunday School Chairs

I’m afraid this is only going to touch on the surface of a deep topic. We won’t even get as far as the technical details of chair type and placement today… just hit on a few theoretical points. Let’s see how much I can get out of one scanty semester’s worth of sociology, which I don’t plan to use at all, and the motto, “Most things can be reduced to geometry if you try hard enough.”

Your situation is a Sunday School class, pre-lesson. Said Sunday School class does not have an extremely high population value, but it is not extremely low either. (I.e. more than just you and your leader.) Your desired result for the combination of situation and population value is a room of happily talking people. How do you arrange this via the chair setup?

Your first thought is a circle of chairs. Just remember that 6 or 7 people (who know each other tolerably well) is the maximum number for a cohesive group. Any more than that, and your ratio of happy talking value to population value plummets. (Unless you are blessed with a high extrovert per head value) You will get either silence or a few scattered hushed chats.

Arrange the chairs in rows and you may not have everyone talking to everyone all the time, but you will have several free conversations going on, which easily provides you with a room of happily talking people. Since these conversations are not entirely isolated, every once in a while, you will attain the ultimate triumph – some topic will leak out of a group into the rest of the room and pull everyone into a conversation.

It’s all about geometry. And the moral of this geometry lesson is: Lines trump circles!