the corioblog : read, and be entertained

Level Up!

The paradox of excellence is that for doing good work, your reward is more work to do. Actually, it’s not much of a paradox unless you assume that a fundamental goal at work is to earn the most pay for the least amount of trouble, which seems a very reasonable goal. It’s not quite the same as least effort: something fun can be quite challenging, but no trouble at all. Still, even given that goal, the pattern at work is something like this: dive into the fun stuff with gusto. Do a good if uninspired job on the troublesome stuff. Then get given more responsibilities.

That’s what happens to me at least. I got a call from the CO CDR last night saying that the BN CDR wanted to meet both of us this morning to talk about additional duties. At the meeting, he told me that based on the recommendations of the senior warrants in the battalion, he was tasking me to be the BN Flight Operations officer.

BN Flight Operations is a full-time job. To accomplish this, I’m being pulled out of Charlie Company and moved into HHC: I’m a staff aviator now. I get my own office, immunity from most random details, and I drop every additional duty except my other BN one: Flight Records. Keeping even one is unusual, and that particular one more so: for years, those jobs have been split to keep the workload manageable. I get to buck that trend. This doesn’t exactly help me build up my flight hours or earn my PC orders, but it can’t hurt my career to have on my OER that I was picked by name to do both these critical BN jobs while still junior.

The job itself is a bit of a cipher to me: I’ve never yet touched the Operations side of things. Scuttlebutt has it as complex, data-heavy, and requiring flexible work hours: perfect, in other words, for me. Hopefully the match works as well in reality as it does on paper.

I’m not completely unambivalent about this: it means even more delay until I get my PC orders, a lightened flight schedule even once I have them, and a lot of work in the meantime. It means that even when I earn my callsign, it won’t start with Comanche, but Wild Card. I regret both of those things. Still, the regret is minor compared to the excitement. This seems like it could be a lot of fun.

2010 06 21 2-2 ASLT Comments (0) Permalink

The Myth of Sisyphus

Reading Albert Camus’s book. So far, I can’t say I’m impressed.

He’s got a big vocabulary. So do I. I’ve experienced often enough the fact that people assume that this implies intelligence far beyond what actually exists. Now I have evidence: this book, which I’m reading because of a recommendation saying it was quite profound, so far is nothing much except him long-windedly laying out postulates and concluding that as there are no moral absolutes which can be derived from scratch, everything is terrible.

Again: I’m currently only partway into the book. Still, unless he comes out with something astonishing before the conclusion, I’ll be vindicated in my prediction that this book is little more than overrated crap.

2010 06 17 bibliophile Comments (1) Permalink

What to do about the North

I’ve been reading books about North Korea since I got here to the South. I think that by this point I’ve got a fair sense of what the nation is, and what it might do. Given that, I think that the US, S. Korea, and as many of the UN as we can convince should enforce a simple, three point plan with regard to the North:

Deny aid.
Cease trade.
Enforce a blockade.

Is it harsh? Perhaps. Still, it can’t be called unjustified, and it makes perfect sense to let them steep in their own juche.

Every attempt at negotiating with the North has failed. Their internal propaganda brags about reneging on the various nuclear treaties, and claims all aid as tribute. It’s not as though there is any pretense at being anything other than evil. Simply cutting them off from all contact is simultaneously the most effective way to destabilize them and to return to them the contempt in which they hold the rest of the world. So what if they retaliate by banning atomic inspectors? We already know they’ve got the bomb; past that point, the quantity doesn’t matter.

They’d have only three possible developments: thrive, or stagnate, or collapse. I don’t think the first is likely at all. They’d maintain their big option: go to war, or not. I do not think they would go to war. Most likely they’d try to wait it out, wait for the inevitable change in world opinion to get back to a policy of appeasement. By the time they were desperate enough to choose war, their straits should be dire enough that starting one would be obviously suicidal.

If they did start a war, it’d be terrible. They’ll inflict tremendous civilian casualties even if they choose not to use atomic weaponry. Then they would lose.

I’m ok with that, though. It’d be a chance for someone else to be the bad guys for once.

2010 06 14 korea Comments (4) Permalink

Cyrano de Bergerac

Cyrano de Bergerac was the first rapper.

What?

Most rap is the singer bragging about their accomplishments. The most frequently bragged about accomplishments:

The ability to compose verse on the fly.
The ability to seduce women with the aid of said verse
Proficiency with a weapon

Cyrano was accomplished in all of this, before the year 1900.

It is a very fun book, though not one it’s really possible to take seriously. The Brian Hooker translation wonderfully captures the spirit of the verse; I recommend it.

2010 06 10 bibliophile Comments (1) Permalink

Blue House

Last Friday I took a tour of the Blue House: Korea’s executive mansion and offices.

It was a nice enough tour, though we were only allowed to take pictures from three designated locations. For the most part, the landscapes were beautiful and the architecture stately. There were two exceptions: two carefully manicured lawns which had obviously been artificially flattened for use as helicopter landing pads. Unfortunately, I didn’t get much information from the tour guides; they spoke only in Korean, and deputized an astonished KATUSA on the fly to translate for them. The one they chose tended to summarize, for example, a ten minute speech into “See that tree? It’s famous for being 160 years old.”

I cannot overemphasize how ornate and elaborate the changing of the guard ceremony was. It involved a marching band, two parades of guards, a prerecorded speech (with translations following each line into Japanese, English, and Chinese), and much pomp and circumstance. This picture shows just one of the parades of guards, minutes before they marched up to relieve the parade comprised of the previous shift. It was a nice show, but I can’t help but assume that the majority of the guards change shift in a much more relaxed manner, and that this was just an additional duty that some of them picked up somehow.

This particular war memorial was much more inspirational than most I’ve seen in Korea. Then again, its symbolism with a phoenix rising over a smiling family seems less like it’s commemorating less the war of the 1950s than the upcoming one which will unite the peninsula. An interesting message for the memorial in front of the house of the President, but a powerful one.

2010 06 06 korea
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Change of Command Video

At the beginning of this month, I got a task: I was to produce a comedic video short, 10-15 minutes long, celebrating the tenure of the BN Commander, to be shown at his outbound Hail and Farewell dinner. One of my peers would back me up, and I’d have command support for getting the filming done, but this was to be my project. I’m still not sure who decided I’d get the job or why, but I’ve been working diligently on it. I’ll probably put it on youtube when it’s done, which’ll be next week at the latest.

Working on this has been an education. I’ve written before, but only short fiction and nonfiction, not comedy scripts. I’ve shot video before, but only in webcam/home movie contexts. I’ve never even attempted to edit video before. All I bring to the table is an active mind, a powerful computer, and a borrowed camcorder that was on the low end of the scale a decade ago.

Actually, those may well turn out to be sufficient. The basic plan was to take five times as much footage as would end up in the final cut, and spend five times as much time editing as filming; so far that’s proving an effective strategy. Still, I can’t help but sense that unless I pull several more all-nighters working on it, this thing isn’t going to be good enough.

As for what I learned today in particular, there are two major points. The first is that even though this ancient video device claims to have native support in Windows 7, it simply doesn’t appear when plugged in. It’s a good thing I have a spare old XP box lying around, or the editing process would be even more painful. Also, while transcribing these digital video cassettes is at least easier than working with analog, they still have a major drawback in comparison to solid-state storage: they only transfer their bits at 1x speed, meaning that every hour of video takes an hour to transcribe before I can begin editing. It’s an anomaly in a world in which everything else digital happens at some high multiple of realtime.

If only I got paid overtime, I could double my salary. At least I can probably show the Army that they’ve got a bargain in me.

[edit 20100531:2152]

Ok, so the actual numbers worked out like this: 2 hours filming to produce 1 hour film. 15 hours of editing later, I managed to complete this 8 minute first draft. Submitted it to the XO for review, and he said that with this quality, the maximum length should be 5 minutes. So: this draft is guaranteed to contain rare material not contained in the final release! I’ll put the final version up when it’s done; the challenge is to use the cutting to improve the overall quality.

[edit 20100531:2250]

Oh yes: I don’t expect this to be comprehensible, let alone amusing, to anyone who isn’t already familiar with the outgoing commander of 2-2 ASLT. 90% of this is in-jokes.

[edit 20100601:0437]

Final cut. If it’s not down to five minutes exactly, it’s at least less than six; it would have been very difficult to remove much else without gutting it. Enjoy!

2010 05 27 2-2 ASLT
what i learned at work today Comments (0) Permalink

i got the twitter

@coriolinus

It sounds like a disease, doesn’t it?

2010 05 12 geekspeak Comments (0) Permalink

Don Quixote

After 863 pages of the man from la Mancha, that book is finally finished. Normally such length wouldn’t be a real obstacle, but this time I found myself reading half a dozen more contemporary novels between the time I started and finished the classic, just to remind myself that I enjoy reading. I come away from it with the deep conviction that the only way to truly enjoy a book like this is to read it in the original language–I read the Grossman translation.

The problem is that as far as I can tell, a huge part of the appeal of this book is the authorial voice: sly, witty, full of puns and references. Unfortunately, witty writing is particularly difficult to translate. Prose that’s sly in Spanish is cumbersome in English, if the humor can be translated at all. More than a few times, it couldn’t: a non-sequitur would be footnoted with an explanation of how it was actually a quite clever formulation in Spanish.

Once you’ve stripped away the authorial voice and wordplay through translation, and the cultural references are after 400 years only comprehensible through footnotes, all that’s left of the story are the bare bones of the events. This is unfortunate, because aside from about a dozen pages at the beginning and end narrating the premise and his eventual death, the rest of the book breaks down into an endless series of identical episodes. In each one, the Don meets someone or something, responds inappropriately based on his conviction that he’s a mighty knight, and both he and Sancho suffer in consequence. Over and over and over again.

I can’t call Don Quixote an enjoyable book to read. On the other hand, it’s not just the first modern novel in any language; it’s a story that we’re still telling: Kick-Ass is nothing more than a modern skin on this ancient framework. For the experience of having read it, it was worth making the effort at least once. I just don’t ever expect to pick up that book again.

2010 05 04 bibliophile Comments (1) Permalink

keeping up

Today I got to code to solve a problem. The Army’s bit of code which moved flight records from the maintenance database into the pilot records database broke, and I got to write a replacement. It’s trivial code, really: take a fairly complex SQL join generated by MSSQL, and write its results to an XML file using a particular schema. Still, I got really, stupidly excited about this.

I also learned some things:

I am very, very out of practice. More than four hours into the exercise, I was still debugging. The bugs were things like MSSQL Optional Feature Not Implemented, not actual logic errors, but still. That’s too long given the complexity of the task.
I have a lot of fun coding. In a basically unprecedented move, I was delaying leaving work until the guy whose office I was borrowing made me leave so he could lock up. Especially given that I’d had an 11 hour day at that point, this is a significant development.
For all that I rag on MS products, the MSSQL query designer really does take a lot of work out of the process of writing complex queries.

Actually, 90 minutes into the exercise, a civilian contractor came by and worked magic and solved the problem for which I was writing code in the first place. I kept working, using the excuse that my version will be more featureful than the Army’s, and that by having the source to it the Army will benefit. The real reason is much simpler: I’m having way too much fun to just give this project up. I am perpetually at the 50% mark and working rapidly towards completion; I’m not going to let this just escape me.

2010 04 13 programming Comments (0) Permalink

A Happier Video

2010 04 07 geekspeak
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