What do you want to do?
Is it profitable?
No?: Then forget it. It can’t be done.
Or, maybe… Someone will contribute: Grant money, a government subsidy, a tax break. Maybe someone will look the other way on ‘externalities’: let you cut costs by dumping, pick up the tab for the social fallout so that you don’t have to… Is it profitable yet?
ROI And Discount Rates - A Diversion
Something I learned in a Project Management class has never sat well with me… I knew something was wrong at the time when my classmates couldn’t explain how the professor came up with the discount rates in her example. I jumped to the conclusion that she didn’t know herself. My classmates had only the thinnest grasp of the foundations - they clearly weren’t comfortable tinkering with the numbers beyond the examples from the blackboard. Perhaps this is just one of my bad habits: Asking too many questions… And there was a lot of grumbling from both sides when I would ask questions about this. Everyone just assumed that I was an idiot - Questioning the gospel. The answers tended to go around in circles - circular logic. The answer given was “Cost of Capital”, but with every step away from the core of the material in search of answers, people got understandably wary that it would never end, and irritated with me for caring. So much for education: We were spending a lot of time memorizing acronyms from Earned Value theory of Cost Control. We were too busy to learn about Asset Pricing Models or some-such.
Discount rates make sense in a stable environment: A volatile environment is precisely the situation where you run into difficulties. What’s in store for the future? Inflation? Hyper-Inflation? Maybe Deflation? What discount rate should you choose when you make descisions about a reasonable Return on Investment? In a deflationary period, you could make a profit even with a nominal loss.
But as you may or may not have discovered, supply and demand on money is affected by ‘substitute goods’. Also, if everything is a transaction, how can money be created or destroyed? - Even with taxes or fees, isn’t there a kind of ‘conservation of cash’? When the stock market goes down, it means money is being pulled out. Doesn’t that money have to go somewhere? Money taken out of stocks gets put somewhere else: A bank account, then maybe commodities, durables, consumables. But the seller of those items receives the money. And the taxman takes his cut. No money created or destroyed - just ‘redistributed’. Help me out if I’m working with any bad assumptions here. When you lose money on stocks (or gold, or land, or antique cars), it is actually on a pair of transactions. Same thing when you win: Buy low, sell high. Why doesn’t everybody get to do that?
Inflation is often blamed on the volume of money - the ‘Money Supply’. That’s a big theme in that book “The Great Wave” that I’m reading. And in those plumbing models from 20th century economics. Money supply is more than just cash, depending on your definition, it includes a bunch of I.O.U.s in transit - checks in the mail, but also ‘corporate paper’ and some other financial instruments you and I will probably never encounter in real life. Anything that increases the supply of this definition of money creates a bidding war on anything hard cash can be traded for, and that causes inflation. The only problem with that is we tend only to notice inflation on everyday items. If some complicated theory is used to price financial instruments, the rising prices on things like stocks, bonds, or Collateralized Debt Obligations are either some indication of economic health, or just another place to stash big stacks of money that don’t raise the price of bread, milk, gasoline and washing machines. Bubbles can happen in anything from Internet start-ups to real estate, and the general effect there is once again to prevent all that money from bidding up the price of consumer products.
From “The Great Wave”, I learned that inflation doesn’t affect all products the same way. In historical periods of inflation (the very Great Waves Fischer is referring to), prices on raw commodities go up faster than manufactured goods: Food and fuel that even the poor must consume vs. Fancy goods that only the wealthy would buy anyway.
Many governments have tried to print their way out of a budget crisis, and that makes everything worse. Just look at Argentina, or Weimar Germany… Inflation erodes the value of the cash you’re holding. It punishes the creditor because the money is worth less when they get it back… Enter the discount rate. Let’s jigger it so the debtor has to pay back a little more the longer they wait to do it. Whatever the payment schedule, we can tack on 10% to what’s left unpaid.
Now it’s investing time. I’ll have to measure my ROI against inflation: I’ll want a higher percentage than the inflation that I can expect over the life of the investment - If I stuff the money in my mattress, it’s losing value, so I am virtually forced to invest it in something. There is even some risk to the mattress strategy - maybe the house burns down. Within a certain range, investing is stimulated. Outside of that range, not so much… During deflation, that mattress strategy starts looking pretty good. During deflation, the value of the money you hold is going up, so why would you loan it out to anybody? On the other hand, if inflation gets too high, you’ll have some trouble finding a high enough ROI. Demand all the profits you want, but will any venture be able to provide them?
Did you figure out what the discount rate should be yet?
Then we should add in the ‘risk premium’: If the investment is risky, the discount rate should be higher. The investor should get something extra back, since he might not get anything at all. Paying that back can be tricky, so the expectation of a high profit goes up too.
We’re back to the beginning now: It’s not the good ideas that will win, but the profitable ideas. One school of thought holds that the profitable is the good. But since high profits are often the cover for some negative externality, maybe the ideas attached to them are not so good.
Have I Rambled Too Far?
What is altruism, after all? If we want to give something away, where is a good place to do the giving? Should we give a boost to the profit extractors, or the good ideas that won’t profit left to themselves?
At Wikipedia I read: “For an investment to be worthwhile, the expected return on capital must be greater than the cost of capital.”
Can you refine your definition of “worthwhile”? Isn’t it also worthwhile to achieve a desired goal, even if you should lose some money in the process? Isn’t that a vehicle for altruism? Don’t governments generally engage in that type of behavior to provide for the society in general? By losing money on an investment, you pass along wealth to some effect: But be careful when you do - It might improve life for the masses, or it might ‘line some billionaire’s pocket’.
Posted in economics, school | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Wed, 29 Oct 2008 13:28:00 GMT
I just couldn’t get enough book reviews on the web this morning: Like this Business Week article “What I Learned at Harvard Business School” on Philip Delves Broughton’s book “Ahead of the Curve: Two Years at Harvard Business School”.
I recognized his motivation for going to business school: thinking he’d profit from “a general competence in business.”
I went to business school for a little while. It sure wasn’t Harvard. In fact, now the mere mention of Harvard embarrasses me. I couldn’t believe how my chain-store degree factory thought they were going to inspire school spirit. I didn’t want to call a whole lot of attention to my presence there. That probably made it that much worse. In fact, I used to lament the whole sordid business. I have that serious “learning disability” that nobody ever wants to talk about: I think education involves collecting knowledge. How charmingly naive!
I have also come to some of the same conclusions… Well, they sound the same to me, which is what ultimately matters to my life planning: I want to work hard, but I don’t want my life to be dominated by work. I want to be able to contribute something to society without being sucked under the wheels of the train.
When I see people working frantically - and this partly explains my hatred of deadline work - I just think they’re doing something wrong. Yes, there needs to be some sense of urgency, but taking that to extremes is… incorrect. I always envisioned a much calmer, deliberate work process.
Posted in school, books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 11 Aug 2008 15:54:00 GMT
Maybe take a quick look at What Do Your Words Say?. Brilliant.
It got me thinking about Stephen Pinker. One of his books explains why the structures in language don’t get too formal, even though some literature does: The children have to be able to understand it.
So we do develop a lot of high-test addition to our natural languages: Legalese, anybody? 1337-speak? And, as an enthusiast of Japanese, I would be respectfully pleased if I might be allowed to request of you the favor of hearing this humble manservant’s entreaties regarding ultra-polite language constructs in that aforementioned distant archipelago. Also LOLcat: Leef I alone. I iz bloggin.
But we don’t start the children out on LOLcat, do we?
It’s sad how a good teacher is an anomaly these days.
I left a comment, but right away, I wanted to say more / say different things.
Joeysmom’s title reminds me of a TV show you didn’t see. In one episode of “Wonderfalls”, Jaye meets a woman who stutters, and the stuffed animal tells her “Get her words out!”. It’s not exactly related, but I can’t help thinking of it.
Posted in ontology, school, books, writing-craft | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 23 Jun 2008 17:06:00 GMT
Slashdot has a discussion going about this article in Wired, Top 5 Reasons It Sucks to Be An Engineering Student. I sent the link to my sister, but the more I think about it, the more I have to say. To summarize the article:
5. Awful Textbooks
4. Professors are Rarely Encouraging
3. Dearth of Quality Counseling
2. Other Disciplines Have Inflated Grades
1. Every Assignment Feels the Same
This isn’t my top 5, but it’s not too far off the mark. For one thing, I never experienced #1. The assignments were monotonous at times, but never lacked variety. Often one assignment was a replay of another, but not that often.
I like to think that #2 is more true these days than it was in 1992, my last full year of full-time engineering school. There were always rumors of declining academic standards and grade inflation, but we couldn’t see it in our department. There were some serious hard-asses handing out the lessons - especially in the lab. Lab instructors weren’t tenured like the white-bearded wizards up in the department offices. I usually had a knack with the lecture material, so I’m probably the wrong guy to ask about that - those classes did sometimes seem to basic to me, but that was less of an issue as I went along.
Amen to #3. I never did figure out what Engineers did. That’s why I’m not one now. All I ever needed was a vision of my future that I could share. Most of what it seemed I would be doing was vaguely “missile guidance systems”, and I desperately needed someone to show me there were other paths I could walk.
I can’t remember a single inspiring professor at this remove. Mainly because enough of the non-engineering professors were so engaging. I had a really good experience studying Japanese - but that was my only real college experience, when I felt almost no pressure to pay my way or worry about the outside world, and I could bring a lot of effort to bear on one thing that I found rewarding. The engineering professors were like robots. They shielded themselves from you with TAs and put you to sleep in their lectures. These guys in my Communication Engineering class came to me once asking me if I would tutor them. “Tutor? - Are you guys out of your minds?”. It turned out that they concluded that I already knew the material because I would read a book in the lectures. If I was trying to provoke the professor, he didn’t rise. I was ready to field any snarky professorial questions. So before the exam, I was tutoring these guys on Convolution Integrals. I doubt they got much out of it - I was a little worried it was over their heads. They hadn’t the foundation for it, you could see it in their eyes. There I was, a 21-year-old, very worried about how people were (or weren’t) being educated. I guess I’ve always go that to fall back on.
Oh, yeah: I think I can explain #5, although there are no good excuses. My textbooks routinely cost $100 a pop in 1990. Other subjects didn’t experience that for another decade or so. The complaint in Wired is not apt: I never expected the textbooks to “inspire” me with design and color. Maybe that’s because I grew up in a house full of engineering textbooks. They’re not meant to be entertaining. Most of the textbooks that I used were precious distillations of crucial information. They were utilitarian, not diverting. “Interrupted by lengthy equations” is the definition of Engineering - what’s the problem? Moving from one symbol system to another doesn’t bother a student of Chinese. The problem is that publishers are going to use the editors they have - namely non-engineers. The equations often had typos. The books were well worth the price… provided the equations were correct. With the errors it felt like a betrayal. My bridge was going to fall down, or my circuit catch fire if I put my trust in those equations. The only bright side was the lesson in fallibility: Get curious as to where those equations come from and learn to verify what you’ve got. So much of engineering was contained in ‘cookbooks’ with canned formulas. Lots of people can follow a recipe, but that doesn’t mean that the food will come out tasting good.
Maybe I should close with a quote from the peanut gallery - ahem! - the Slashdot discussion:
Engineering education works perfectly; it prepares you for the boredom ahead of you.
Posted in ontology, school, books | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 24 Mar 2008 17:04:00 GMT
I had a sickening thought the other day: I don’t think writing about the things I enjoy writing about is enough to qualify me as a writer. (I’m even getting sick of writing so much about writers, but that’s another story…)
This thought of mine is a machine. The way a paper airplane or a flow chart is a machine. So please don’t see the worst. Please don’t indict me for being defeatist. Understand how this sickening thought of mine has more in common with a road map than a verdict.
Writing for enjoyment is the easy way out. Writers are the people who write on assignment. About things they may not really care about. We all did it in school, some more than others. Just as the worker doesn’t get to decide what automobile he wants to assemble today, or what ditch he wants to dig, or what latte to make, a working writer doesn’t get to decide what he wants to write. And get paid for it. But okay, there is a difference of degree here. It’s not so black and white. Writers have more freedom than manual laborers. But all writers live in the shadow world of Art: Making only the art you prefer could lead to starvation before success.
I noticed - and I hope you can identify with this - that when I already know a story, I don’t have a lot of trouble telling it. If I have to invent from scratch, I have more trouble. So I could just take the trouble-free route and hope that will pay the bills. How long do you think that is going to work?
In school, we got a lot of assignments that boiled down to this: Tell a story. Get up in front of a bunch of people, project a slide show, and explain it all. This always drove me crazy because it could never be about anything I already understood. I can lecture for hours on many subjects. Given an hour or two to prepare, I could even give those lectures structure. But I fell for a reasonable sounding trap: School is about learning, so I should be learning something I don’t know. More recently, I was involved in group projects with people who didn’t know either. For some reason, they didn’t have the same trouble making stuff up in front of a crowd. To me this is anathema. I probably have the skill to do it, but I am allergic to bullshit. I seize up in front of a crowd if I don’t believe in what I have to say. I have begged these ‘teammates’ to explain, and they won’t do it. They sat there producing computer documents that were meaningless - that didn’t tell a story. I wondered if I was cut out for that life: All sizzle and no steak.
How could I talk about what wasn’t real to me yet? Imagine all the times I was ready to blow the cover off and rant that it was all a farce - we hadn’t learned anything, and I was even more confused than when we started. The effect of the team was peer pressure. I kept my mouth shut because I was afraid to say something to that effect. And that pained look on my face made it even harder to spout out breezy platitudes.
Growth is dependent on exploring new territory. To rely on what I already know is a slow death. I have to be able to fail. A lot. And I’m not so excited about the collateral damage. I could just feel my brain atrophy.
So like I said… I wouldn’t be much of a writer if I wrote only when I felt like it, or wrote only about subjects that interest me. As with bodybuilding, with no pain, no gain.
Posted in writing-craft, school | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 18 Feb 2008 21:50:00 GMT
I spent a long time reading “Lookout Cartridge”, but I’m finally done. I really did read about 4/5ths of that book once before. At about that point, the story becomes difficult to follow - it’s not the sort of book you can read casually in short installments on your daily bus commute. But that’s basically how I did it. Yes, I read a lot of other things during that time, but it took more than a month to read because I frequently had to double back and refresh my memory of what had happened. Part of the genius of “Lookout Cartridge” is the complete confusion of time in the narrative. There is a main thread of timeline, but so much of the story is flash-back, flash-forward, and otherwise uncertain references to subsequent memories of the past that maybe haven’t happened yet(?). I’m still a bit confused. Maybe I just haven’t read enough fiction to keep track of a cast of characters. It gets worse because the narrator often doesn’t know who some of those people are, but as the story fills out, he does have theories about who and what he saw them doing in the past. Sound interesting?
I’ve also just begun reading David E. Nye’s “Technology Matters”. I saw it in the store months ago and was mildly interested. For reasons I don’t completely understand, it had been sitting in an open box with a bunch of other books in my office. I think they were from a return to the publisher. It doesn’t happen to a lot of books, but there are a few that wind up at the office for no good reason. Hopefully I didn’t sent it to myself from the store and then forget… Well, even if I did, it all worked out okay because I bought it. Here is a topic that gets me excited. Of course, this is mainly in response to the pathetic attempts of schools to teach it to me over the years. Back in 1990 GW made its Engineering students take a class called “Technology And Society”. They must really get a sense of accomplishment from requiring a course! That ought to solve everything - just require it as a course!
(Clearly I’m not finished with my thought from last night about not finding anybody to interact with in college.) It’s a real Catch-22, thought isn’t it? At 19 I didn’t have much experience of the world yet, so it didn’t help to sit around in a discussion of other ignorant 19 year olds talking about the dangers of bad computer programming. This was way too far in advance of the Y2K issue - that might have stimulated the discussion. But I will say it over and over until somebody else believes it: Students need to be taught first, then they can form reasonable opinions (if they are indeed reasonable), and then they might have something useful to add to discussions. As the world becomes more complex, I feel less authorized to claim a stand on anything. What you see me doing here is different - I babble about intelligent topics until I start making sense. That doesn’t make me too terribly informed or correct, but it helps to show off the structure of ideas. And it is why it would be much better to have people converse with me about those things instead of me babbling about them like a schizophrenic homeless person. The more books I read the better, but reading all the books in the world isn’t going to substitute for discussion. And last night I remembered too clearly that classmates since high school would see me with a non-assigned book and walk quickly in the opposite direction. As an adult I get a lot of respect as a reader, but also a lot of fear that it is contagious. They probably also respect circus acrobats - but wouldn’t ever want to try out the high wire themselves.
Remember how I read Robert Friedel’s “A Culture Of Improvement”? Well, I notice his name shows up in Nye’s acknowledgments section. So it’s no wonder I was browsing this book back in the Summer. And it is one more reminder that there are “so many books, so little time”. I hardly read a tenth of what I would like to read, and what I would like to read is limited by my reluctance to look too hard for more. (I mean, when am I gonna read that stuff I don’t know about if I can’t even read most of what I do?)
Posted in books, school | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Wed, 02 Jan 2008 13:30:00 GMT
I just arrived at work. I was planning to get in at 8:00, but that extra hour of sleep was just delicious. It’s Christmas Eve, but so far I’m just not feeling it. NPR’s Morning Edition played a bit of David Sedaris’ “Holidays on Ice”, which is always funny. On the other hand, it only contributes to the subversive aspect of my holiday spirit.
Unfortunately, this turned out to be a bad day to come in late. First, I logged in to the Unix system and it sat there thinking about whether to let me in or not. I tried again on three other terminals, with the same result. I sat here waiting for one of them to let me in, not able to clock in until one did. After a few minutes I let my paranoia get the best of me and called our eccentric programmer. He noticed that the system had been a little sluggish, and revealed that he was running a special program that needed to be run if we were to clean up after last week’s disaster. While I was on the phone to him, the logins finally decided to let me in - but I had set off a chain of uncertainty, and I had to wait until I was sure we would not attempt a 9:15 reboot - with one store and mail order already embroiled in their tasks.
So he halted the important cleanup program to resume later tonight, and I waited for the all clear before running the sales analysis programs (‘Recommended Purchases Report’ and the automatically chained ‘Sales Batch Update’). I can’t do much else until those programs finish, so I went over to the tape drive to switch backup tapes. The truck driver brought his son along today, so they were in the kitchen raiding the party leftovers. I strolled back into my office to wait for the programs to finish, and their Telnet sessions had been closed(!) …So I was back on the phone to the programmer. No, wait - he called ME to give me a progress report on his cleanup program. That was when I asked him about my sales analysis programs getting clobbered.
Well we are getting to that point of discomfort - where buyers are going to get upset that they can’t work on their RPRs (that’ll be the first obstacle out of our way), where stores will start wondering where their morning printouts are, and where the used book buyer will start wondering where his weekly sales figures are. Everything else I do today will be delayed by two hours - although happily, it will not be slowed to a crawl by system cleanup.
I’ve realized recently - what I could have known all along - that multi-tasking is driving me crazy. The sense of all the other tasks that need doing impinges on the task that I actually am doing at any given moment. You have to be able to visualize the big picture while you examine one little detail with a magnifying glass, but not to the extent that you can’t concentrate on anything. No matter how important anything is - or how much unimportant miscellaneous stuff you can take care of while waiting for something along the ‘critical path’ to finish so you can keep going - it always feels like I’m going to find out I was wrong to think I had to wait to start something else more important. Especially right now, when I’m consciously staggering out those ‘critical path’ tasks because I got stung already today by trying to pack them all in to the least possible time.
I was thinking some more about the ‘graph theory lite’ we studied in my Project Management class last summer. I call it ‘lite’ because I was the only one in the room who seemed to have the math background to manipulate directed graphs. Everybody else thought it was hard work, and I wondered what planet they were all from. The example graphs never got big enough to need algorithms or proofs (or how about some simulated annealing, or some heuristic satisficing? - oh, never mind…) It seemed like nobody else really got anything out of that knowledge. Later when it might have been of use in the group projects, people instinctively knew that it was irrelevant. So why did we bother? If people aren’t learning it anyway, and not using it, why is anybody upset (you know, aside from ME) that nobody know it? Why is the time wasted teaching it?
…As an afterthought, I stuck in these pictures, for no real reason other than to decorate. They are from the park about a week ago, and I noticed a lot of red and green together in the photos I took. That might make up for my streak of ‘subversive’ Christmas spirit, should anybody else be keeping track of such things. Enjoy.
Posted in ontology, photos, school, olssons | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Mon, 24 Dec 2007 13:58:00 GMT
The Gift Guide at work is about as baked as it is going to be, which is to say “Half”. Today was the final fit of script and layout editing. How do I know it was final? Okay, so I don’t… but I have not until today seen any kind of remuneration. When store credit in dollar amounts came up, I could see we were basically done. (Store Credit: I’d complain, but I already knew that was how it would be… And, I suppose I’ve got uses for Monopoly Money - I have in the past.)
I don’t want to sound like I’m getting down on my employer, relative to the rest of the world. My ideals of perfection keep me rocking back and forth in the corner muttering to myself most days, so anything that results in finished product is a win… right?
So in that spirit, I would like to explain a situation that I assume is fairly common: Today was bearable. The change requests were not absurdly difficult. The scope of the Gift Guide was more manageable compared to previous years, which meant less brute-force work like entering titles and formatting artwork. Knowing this in advance, I was careful to think through my ideas and not rush to act. I decided to try a PHP script, and I let the idea ferment in my mind for a few days before attempting it head-on. This is one of the few times I could see the path ahead clearly. I intended to take small simple steps, ensuring that each bit did what I wanted it to do. I entered a few titles and made sure the look was right. I listened to feedback (most of it was way too cosmetic - nobody ever commented on the program logic or block level arrangement), and kept my options open the best I could.
That is how we could arrive at today. I was like the main character in a samurai movie. They kept sending me ninjas one by one, and I kept slicing those ninjas to ribbons. I had reviewed the mechanics of my code very well, and within minutes of any oddball request, I could say how it could be done, or argue why it could not be done. A few minutes later, I would do it, hacking out a compromise where necessary. The compromises usually generated a new round of oddball requests - fundamental design issues, sometimes. But I had both my programmer hat and my consultant hat precariously balancing together on my head. I could talk up strengths and weaknesses, I could suggest easy ways out just for the sake of comparison, and the few minutes talking it over practically allowed me to code my way out of a jam in the back of my head before I even sat down to do it.
Now, all of this flies in the face of what I learned in college. Which is probably why I had trouble taking anything seriously in those Web Design or Project Management classes. That wasn’t so long ago - I put on a brave face with “This all sounds great, but do real people actually plan things out so carefully?” - but more importantly you could say it was a cry for help: “Can’t you people with your Good News about rational planning rescue me from this living hell?” You see how it’s a two way street? They claimed my experience would serve me well as I learned more, and they would have been right, if only my experience didn’t contradict what they tried to teach me.
It’s all very spectacular to throw all kinds of oddball requests at your competent programmer - but is it worth it? At the end of it, the Marketing Director feels obligated to reward me because she threw so many ninjas at me. Don’t you think it all could have been in a day’s work? Normal levels of effort? - Because I do. If they had come to me in plenty of time, with a design - or at least some guidelines, I would not have required any special effort; I would not have had to alter my schedule, or push my other responsibilities aside. Today it was as if they had finally decided they should design the thing. Much of that design is arbitrary decisions I was forced to make early on. They even apologized for not starting with a design. I feel strange complaining about it, because I wound up sharpening my skills in the process, but when I think about the bottom line - loads of effort that has to be rewarded vs. normal effort in the course of a normal day - all that pressure cost more in money and stress. It doesn’t sound like a great way to run the show.
But come to think of it, I see it all the time in the book ordering department: Customers - the institutional folks mostly, I guess they’ve got bureaucracies to content with on their end - come to us with tight deadlines. You have to wonder about people who run to you, out of time and out of breath, looking for rush shipping on obscure items. Did they really not know until now that they were in a hurry?
This is a culture of dread.
Posted in school, programming, web-craft, olssons | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Wed, 05 Dec 2007 23:24:00 GMT
Remind me to tell you about:
Sunday Vanessa called me to ask why she heard a band playing in the street. I realized it was a Catholic festival that I had seen and photographed once several years back. They carry a portable shrine up Columbia Road, stopping occasionally to bless infants in front of the altar. A little band with drums, trombone and tuba follow along. It’s the sort of thing I wind up missing now that I return home from the other direction. I took photographs, but I still need to sort through them. Conditions were not ideal.
Tuesday I went with my sister to help her shop for a suit. She’s an interpreter now, so she’s looking for a gig. There is an agency that supplies interpreters for the State Department, but so far it’s all been happening over the telephone.
Wednesday - Halloween - we sat around at Olga’s apartment. She worked on her computer and I read a book. After a while she decided that she needed to immerse herself in Russian if she wanted to stay limber for simultaneous interpreting. The job interview was also going to include questions about “Americana”. Your guess is as good as mine. We brainstormed on American history and current events. You really have to have a foot in both worlds if your job is to be the bridge. I underestimate my knowledge of what is going on in my own society, but Vanessa said that I ought to be teaching foreigners - apparently there is a need for it. I have a lot to teach, but it isn’t what I would call practical. There might be people out there who would appreciate it, but the trend has been towards mercenary, least effort credentials. The more I learn, the less I feel qualified for anything.
I’ve been slowly working my way through Orhan Pamuk’s “Other Colors”. Vanessa remarked “You’re still reading that?” Yesterday I actually spent a solid block of time with it, which is not so easy with her visiting. Since some of the essays refer to the novels I haven’t read yet, I’m ever more curious about those. I pulled down “The Black Book” from the shelf this morning, and I’m a little confused: He said that Black Book had fake newspaper articles interspersed through the story, in imitation of the well known columnists in Turkey. At a glance, I don’t see them. He also remarked that “My Name Is Red” is a retelling of a story from medieval Turkey about a couple who fall in love - she based on a portrait of him, and he based on a description of her. But there are elements of that story as I skim through “Black Book”.
In my spare time I am again trying to master the programming language Ruby. I’ve fallen in love with the peculiar forms it uses. The blog tool I am using here is actually written in Ruby - not that I’ve ever opened up the source code to take a look.
Posted in DC-roaming, school | no comments | no trackbacksPosted by Evan Bittner
Thu, 01 Nov 2007 14:49:00 GMT
