Wednesday, September 28, 2005

Tunnels

You are not going to believe this. There are tunnels underneath the building.

Tunnels.

We were told about them yesterday, as part of the briefing Jennings held separately for each department. Yes, we are expanding, as a result of new threats that have arisen and the need for our parent organization to handle more things "off the books". There will be anywhere between 10 and 15 new field agents joining us within the month, and around 30 support staffers. Naturally, the question was asked, "Where are we going to put all of these people?" The office doesn't have nearly enough space to hold the new people... there are only 3 or 4 empty offices and they are being used as temp conference rooms. But Jennings just calmly mentions that the teams will be reorganized and some will be using the office across the parking lot.

Arrington, who has recently stepped up his already impressive whining efforts, immediately starts a diatribe about how it's hard enough to work with people on the other side of the building, but it's impossible to work with people in another building altogether. Phone calls and e-mails, while secure, are not the best way to communicate, he says. And walking from building to building is an unacceptable security risk. Note that I'm in agreement with everything he's saying... I just would have stated it differently, if at all, because I know that Jennings isn't an idiot and he's already addressed these issues.

"That's why we'll be using the tunnels," he says, as though everyone will just naturally nod their heads and say, "Oh yes, of course! The tunnels!" No, everyone's reaction was, "What in the blue hell are you talking about?" Then he brings us all to see the tunnels.

At the bottom of one of the internal stairwells there's a double-doored electrical closet. It's actually the entrance to the tunnel. Sort of. There's the standard electrical closet stuff, but there's also an access panel used to open the back wall of the closet, and *poof*, that's where the tunnels are. And they lead to every damned building in the office park, where presumably a similar electrical closet it set up for the same reason.

Jennings says that we'll be using only one set of tunnels and the rest will remain sealed off for the time being. Standard protocols will be put in place to ensure that people don't enter one building and exit another by accident. This, in particular, has the potential to get really annoying. Because the new office has a different cover story, and those who work in the current building can't change their cover story, if I am reassigned to the new building, I'll still have to enter and exit through the old building and use the tunnels to get to my office.

Stay tuned for more crazy.

Monday, September 26, 2005

Not A Date

So I had a not a date on Saturday night. I'm still not sure exactly what happened. See, it doesn't happen very often that a girl calls me out of the blue and says, "Let's get together." And when it does, I usually consider it a date. But when she explicitly said it was not a date, I started to question exactly what a date was. Luckily I had some co-workers help me out at lunch on Friday.

I explained the situation: that Sandra had called me and wanted to get together. I explained the level to which I was acquainted with her, and the context of the phone conversation was laid out. "It's definitely a date," said Gruber, "I don't care what she says. She's only saying that because she already has a boyfriend." That's sort of what I thought. Anuradha didn't agree. "If she said it's not a date, it's not a date. She's not really interested in you so much as what you do." Well then why are we going out Saturday night? Why not a Thursday lunch of something. Why block off a weekend night? Anu didn't have an answer for that one, but told me "don't expect to get any."

But does getting some quantify whether or not something was a "date". I've been on dates before where either or both parties were cautious, and things didn't get going until the second or third date. Does that mean that the first one wasn't a date? That seems sort of silly. And what happens if you go out two or three times and decide that it's not going to happen. Does that mean that none of them were ever actually dates? Can a non-date become a date at a later time, or vice versa? It's all very confusing.

Well, we met up at Volterra on Ballard, which isn't too too far from her sister's house. Real nice Italian place, and I had a tough time deciding on what I wanted. I settled from the wild boar tenderloin with Gorgonzola sauce, but I wanted to make sure they were going to cook it right. The thing about wild boar is that you can't cook it any more than medium-rare, unless you want to use a hacksaw to cut it. Suffice it to say, it gets gamey. When the waitress hit me with those facts before I even asked, I know this place wasn't fooling around. I also had my way with a Caesar salad and some bruschetta. She ordered some sort of smoked chicken with pasta. And we talked. A lot of it was about my "work", namely the travel industry and the places to see and the places to avoid and the best times to see and avoid those places. It was fun, actually, talking like an expert about something I should know nothing about. Excellent practice for the cover story is what I mean. Dinner finished up around ten, at which point I walked her back to her car.

Now up until this point, I still wasn't sure whether it was a date or not. There were arguments on both sides:

  • She dressed like it was a date. Not like elegant formalwear, but definitely the kind of outfit you'd wear if you were trying to make an impression
  • The discussion, while slanted a bit towards my fake job, was typical first-date feeling-out introductory conversation
  • We shared the Kahlua and Amaretto Semifreddo in what could be construed as a semi-sensual manner
  • There was no suggestion of any after-dinner extension
  • No contact was initiated during dinner, which would be difficult to describe as intimate.
  • She didn't laugh at my "Semifreddo is Al Fredo's younger brother" joke

Well, on the way to the car, I asked when I could see her again, and she just sort of hit me with an "I had a lot of fun" followed by an "I'm really busy", then a few "boyfriends" and then a "but I had a great time and I definitely want to see you again."

So... what the heck does that mean? I don't know. Just par for the course in my life, I guess. The ladies... I do not understand them.


Tomorrow there is a briefing on what I guess you would call new hires. I don't know where we're going to put all of the people that are rumored to be coming, but I'm sure it will all be explained in the meeting. I better not be sharing an office with anyone.

Thursday, September 22, 2005

SimExplosion

Today Jeff showed me some of what the Tech Guys have been doing with the new hardware/software package they got to do simulation and modeling. You can model just about anything with this package if you know the equations, and it has a bunch of stuff like particle tracking and weather forecasting already built in. One of the built-in tools is for nuclear detonations... we don't have much use for it, but it's "fun to play with". You set up a model of a city (most of the major U.S. cities are already modeled) and detonate a nuke of a certain size and the package simulates the explosion for you... which buildings vaporize and which explode and which crumble and which are still standing and from that you would presumably formulate a strategy for evacuation or emergency response. Depending on how much time you have, you can really refine it to the point where you have people in the buildings and cars on the street and things of that nature, which adds all sorts of complexity when it's time to make things explode... the more objects in the simulation, the longer it takes to complete. According to Jeff, the software is so well-written that it doesn't waste a cycle of computing time... but it was always the hardware that was the "gating factor", so the simulations were limited and the output was text-based. Now that the hardware has improved, he can do all sorts of crazy things with it, including rendering everything into crude 3-D video, which seems to have become a pastime of the sim team.

See, Jeff was fiddling around with it one day, and found out that the explosions don't necessarily have to be nuclear, and they don't even have to be that big. He figured out how to model smaller explosions like C-4 or just a regular old grenade. He built a room around it and started putting objects in the room... a lot of them had to be built from scratch, like tables and chairs, but people were already available. So he puts a bunch of tables and chairs in a room, then tosses in a grenade, and tells the machine to render it. Then he and Keith and Andy go off and pick up lunch, and when they come back they sit and watch a bunch of bodies pinball around the room as the bomb goes off. Jeff notes that it is especially funny when the room is made very small and packed with way too many people.

He calls it "SimExplosion".

Well, he showed it to me today and while he was in near hysterics watching some poor Sim's head bounce off a wall, I asked him, "Would it be possible to figure out where in the room a person should go in order to receive the least damage from an explosive?" Jeff blinked a couple of times, and then followed with a slow "Yeah... I guess." See, that's the sort of thing I'm interested in... not dying. I immediate sent him off to start figuring that out. Of course, there's no way to model a room properly without knowing about it beforehand, but I'm having Jeff write up a script that will generate a thousand or so different rooms of varying sizes and contents, model them all, and then write up a report to the effect of "Get behind a table", "Use someone as a human shield", or even "You're pretty much screwed no matter what."

He wasn't too excited when I gave him the task... for the most part it's what he was doing before, only now it's work instead of playtime. He did cheer up a bit when I told him I would need extensive details about potential blood loss and damage to specific body parts. I don't know if any of this is going to be useful, but I figure we have a support staff, we should probably use them for something other than keeping dust off the PS2.

Monday, September 19, 2005

Smooth

I got a phone call on my cell today from an unknown number. Typically I don't answer these, because it's almost always a wrong number, but for whatever reason I did. It was Betty's sister, Sandra (the one with the tool boyfriend). Apparently I gave her my phone number, so she called me. We're going out sometime this weekend... but it's "not a date"... she just found me really interesting and wants to talk to me some more. But it's "not a date" (note the additional emphasis, and the quotes to indicate that these words are not my own. Almost sounded as though she was trying to convince herself, but whatever... I'll be a gentleman. I just can't remember when it was that I gave her my number.

Tuesday, September 13, 2005

Tribute

A foursome from work played the full 18 holes at Jackson Park today. It was Gruber, Jennings (not that Jennings... the other one), Tomlinson, and myself. Tee-time was ten o'clock, which meant no time for work either before or after, which is even better than playing early or playing late, because that always means at least a short visit to the office. None of us had played Jackson Park in a while, so we totally forgot until we got to the eighth hole.

"Wait a sec... isn't this the hole where... yup."

The last time we played this course, we had all started out terribly. It was not a great day for golf... cold, damp, and hazy. I lost a ball in the water on the first hole, then I three or four putted the second hole, which is only about 100 yards in length. Suffice it to say that I wasn't Tiger Woods that day, and neither were my colleagues. So we get to the eighth hole, which is a brutal par four, maybe not quite a dogleg right but certainly a hole that curves that way, and there's a sandtrap on the left. If you have the knack for intentionally putting a slice on the ball, this is your hole. Unfortunately none of us have that talent.

So we all tee it up and hit horrible tee shots. Copithorne tees off last and nails the ball. "Where did it go?" he asks. Well, everyone saw it go up, but we all lost it in the gray skies. No matter, we'll just find it when we get down to that end of the hole.

We didn't.

After looking around for what seems like ten minutes, we convince Copithorne to take a drop. Copithorne takes his drop and puts the next ball in the trap. It takes him two shots to get it out of the trap; his second shot blasts the ball over the green and into the rough. He tries chipping it onto the green, overhits it and puts it back in the trap. Needless to say, we're all laughing our asses off. He's about the snap a club over his knee. His next shot finally lands on the green. Naturally, he's still the furthest away, which just adds to the amusement.

He lines up a putt from forty feet away. "This is seven," he says. "Actually, it's eight," says Gruber, "The drop is a one stroke penalty." Copithorne is pissed. "Eight, fuck you, whatever. You want to remove the pin?"

"You think you're going to sink a forty foot putt on your eighth shot?" comes the reply.

Well, Copithorne lines up the putt and gives it a stroke, which it needed because the greens were slow that day... and it curls all the way into the cup... from forty feet away... with the pin still in place. We're all dumbstruck. Copithorne gives a little Shooter McGavin finger pistol and goes to retrieve his ball while I start lining up my shot. He goes to pick up the ball and stops.

"Guys? Take a look at this."

"What?"

"Come take a look at this."

We all just sort of saunter over to the cup... where we see two balls just hanging out in there.

"Is that..."

"No way. Titleist 4?"

Copithorne pulls both of the balls out. They're both Titleist Fours. We couldn't find his tee shot because it had gone straight into the hole.

"Is that an ace?" Copithorne asks incredulously, "Is that a hole-in-one?"

None of us says anything for a minute, then Gruber pipes in, "Well, it would have been, but you took a drop, so it's an eight." Dead silence. Then hysterics.

Well, when we reached that eighth hole and remembered what had happened, I think we all got the same idea at once. "Take an eight and move on?" I suggested. Everyone just sort of smiled in the goofy way that guys don't like to talk about. We took a few minutes and just walked around the hole, reliving the shot, chuckling a bit, but not saying much. I picked through the extra balls in my bag and found a beat up Titleist 4 in it. We walked over, placed it in the hole, and walked off to the ninth. I knew the next group would probably remove it when they got there, but it didn't matter much. Just a small tribute to our friend. Wherever you are, buddy, I hope the grass is greener and there aren't any hazards.

Monday, September 12, 2005

Cowboy Roy

It occurs to me that no one knows what a Cowboy Roy is. So, the recipe:

vodka
rum
orange juice

Yeah, it's a screwdriver with rum. I don't know why it's called Cowboy Roy, or even if that's what it's called anywhere else... I guess it's named after Roy Rogers. All I know is that it provides ample drunkenness along with plenty of vitamin C.

Monday, September 05, 2005

Hangover

I've got a serious hangover, unlike I've had in a while. And that's good. Every once in a while a man has to tie one on, have himself a good old time, and then take his medicine the next day, and take it like a man.

My friend Betty had a housewarming party... she just bought a house in Ballard. Matty and Angie were there, Betty's two sisters and their boyfriends (one of which, Adam, was a complete tool), Keith and Andy from work, and a bunch of other people I may or may not have mentioned before. A bunch of her coworkers dropped in for a few minutes here and there, but not for any length of time. So we took to drinking, making full use of the blender I brought as a housewarming gift. I myself was getting busy with Cowboy Roys... the girls were making a mess of the kitchen trying to make margaritas. There were all manner of breasts around, most spoken for, but some available. Anyway...

Adam was that kind of tool who thinks he knows everything about everything. The end of the Mariners game was on (by my request), and he had something to say about every play. "Mateo's been in there too long." "Hansen sucks, he shouldn't pinch hit for Torrealba." "Boy, I bet the M's wish they had Guerrero!" OK, thanks for the commentary. When the game ended, though, I thought it was the end of it.

But no. A while later, his girlfriend found out in passing that I was tour guide for Southeast Asia, and she started asking me questions about different places and the best places to go. And everything I said, Adam was right on top of with something to say. Apparently, Nepal is overrun by communists, and there's nothing left of Malaysia since the tsunami. Oh, and we also had about a five minute argument about whether the Khmer Rouge operated in Cambodia or Thailand, because he had "written a term paper on it" when he was in college. I said I hoped he failed that class, because I'd studied the country and I'd been to Cambodia a dozen times, but he was not only the kind of tool who thinks he knows everything, he was also unable to admit he was wrong, even after nine other people disagreed with him and we showed him an encyclopedia.

Most of these folks are pretty domestic, so there was no strip Twister or anything like that. There was a major Taboo battle, and I failed miserably at this DVD game where you have to answer movie trivia. It took me half an hour just to figure out how the special dice worked. Now playing board games might sound pretty lame, but it was actually the opposite, especially when everyone's half in the bag and just about anything anyone says becomes a laugh festival.

Round about ten thirty the cops showed up, responding to a call from a neighbor. I didn't notice them come to the door, so I continued just as loud as I was before they showed up. Everyone was like "Shut up, shut up, it's the police!" Hi, we're not in eighth grade anymore, we can have a party and not run and hide when the cops show up. Turns out that it had nothing to do with being too loud. Someone had screamed pretty loud, and one of the neighbors was worried that there was some domestic abuse. Being the dedicated civil servants they were, the po-po came out, investigated it, and left, but not before being asked, to the amusement of everyone but Adam, what country the Khmer Rouge were in control of.

I don't remember much after the cops came... I'm pretty sure I either passed out or fell asleep, and I'm almost positive I didn't get laid. Morning came fast, and I persuaded everyone who was still around that a trip to Beth's Cafe was in order... I had the biggest jonesing for one of those crazy large 12-egg omelettes with unlimited hash browns, and maybe a P.O.G. (passion fruit, orange, and guava). As it turns out, I ate maybe a third of the omelette and none of the hash browns... my stomach had no interest in food, so I spent most of the time staring at it longingly. I drove myself home afterwards, took some aspirin, and fell asleep again. Woke up to see the end of another Hernandez gem. I seriously need to start planning my extracurriculars around his starts. He's that good.