teachers

semi-ripping off a topic from lj's question of the day: what teacher(s) did you have that inspired you and why?

i have three.
1) mrs. willing, my 7th grade science / homeroom teacher. she realized early on that i had no business being there, so she let me fuck around for the entire class period, and read / do whatever i wanted so long as i wasn't disrupting the rest of the class. i am sure that the fact that i'd read and learned most of the text by the end of the first week of class had something to do with this. i didn't find out until a couple years later when my mom got drunk and let it slip, but she was also the teacher that told my parents it would be a good idea for me to skip 5th and 6th grade. (small grade school, all teachers knew almost all the students.) she let me read this book instead of doing my math homework for a couple weeks, sleep in class, got me into the nerd science & math olympiads, etc. basically, she let me go at my own pace, and introduced me to a lot of much more interesting stuff when the rest of the class was spending a week learning why whales are mammals.

2) mr. z, highschool english / writing teacher.
z was the opposite of mrs. willing and spent most of the semesters i had with him undoing my incredibly shitty schoolwork habits. z knew how well i could do if i decided to put some effort into it, and didn't let me coast or half-ass my way through anything. if i put in enough effort to get a c, even if that would have been an 'a' paper for anyone else, i got a fucking c. he raked me over the coals in grading, taunted me in class, and made me work harder than any other teacher i'd ever had. when i took my placement tests for college, i tested out of english. spent the next couple years taking 400 and 500 level college language and english courses that looked interesting as filler. thanks z.

3) dr. susan haller. computer science professor in college.
spent 4 years telling me to drop out of the major and basically go fuck myself. was completely correct to do so. turned me into the fucking dr. doom of writing code. laugh at me will they? i will DESTROY THEM ALL.
for what it's worth, i'm still not great as a programmer, but i will be damned if i'm going to stop working on something until i get it right.

i somehow missed this by a couple weeks.
yes, this makes me feel old.
still, bonus points for rolling out on the town with a copy of erich fromm instead of 'shoes quarterly', and for the smoke tucked behind the ear.

it is finished

finished bonus features for new site widget. i am a better programmer than i remember. javascript and php can still blow me.
been doing a lot of stuff for random games lately, both larp and tabletop. i feel dirty.
ideally will be caught up with errands and bullshit by tonight. just the idea of that is pleasing to me.

"Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing." - cormac mccarthy

next time, just call the fuckin ghostbusters

the boss lit some herb nonsense to ward off evil spirits in the office yesterday, and walked around smoking all the offices and rooms. today it still smells like cigars and superstition, although slightly less oppressive.
i am pleased to report that my office apparently required three applications of magic anti evil smoke.

tech wizardry

finished a new app this morning. spent the last 3 days working on the motherfucker of all datasets and abusing everything i ever learned about algorithm optimization.
and now, our site has a widget that renders several other websites obsolete. there are two companies that i know of who have teams of people busy working on equivalent applications, and they charge a lot of money for access to them.
i knocked this thing out in a couple days, by myself, and ours works harder, better, faster, and stronger. also, it's going to be just another free feature on our site.
this is why i am such an arrogant dickhead about my job.

porch 101

the last week has cemented it: my front porch is about the most educational place in milwaukee. if you've wandered by in the last week, there were discussions / lectures on general relativity, probability, firearms, property management, comparitive religions, literary analysis, logic, foreign policy, and rock history.
i am pleased to have a diverse set of lunatics regularly holding forth on advanced topics while drinking, as it provides a nice contrast to the bros in our building who just get wasted and toss beanbags.