The Omnigeek

Over the past couple of days, I’ve been working on a PowerPoint presentation for an upcoming training session for my day job. I’m using Microsoft Office 2005′s PowerPoint on a recently upgraded to Snow Leopard (10.6.1) MacBook Pro and I’ve had a couple of odd crashes that I’ve not experienced before.

Both times the OS-X window manager blue screened, brought up the Mac “Plasma” login screen and I was able to log back in and continue work. Now while this may be some Snow Leopard vs. M$OFT quirk causing the window manager to die, I’d rather consider other options.

Higgs Bosons

So just what do these sub-atomic particles have to do with this? Well this article explains why some
reputable scientists believe that the Higgs Bosons (I’m not responsible for the headaches from reading that Wikipedia article) are themselves travelling back in time, sabotaging the Large Hadron Collider to prevent it from creating them.

Time-travelling Higgs sabotages the LHC. No, really

from Newscientist.com. The article quotes the New York Times where it humanized the physics writing:

“the hypothesized Higgs boson… might be so abhorrent to nature that its creation would ripple backward through time and stop the collider before it could make one, like a time traveler who goes back in time to kill his grandfather.”

In my case, I’m going to be teaching a subject that the customers want to learn, but I fear the
Pandora’s Box (slightly NSFW image on the page) that I may be opening by teaching it. The topic is about a templating language we use within our tools.

Both of these quasi-reboots (it only rebooted the Window Manager, not the whole OS!!!) happend as I
was putting together one particular slide on “Lists and Hashes”. Something is telling me to not include this slide. Perhaps I’m going to let people know they can wield more power. Is it karma? An omen? An act from the programmer gods? or Higgs Bosons?

Is what I’m about to teach so abhorrent to nature that its instruction is rippling backwards
through time and stopping my PowerPoint slide before I can create it?

Of course, being a science geek, I should point out Occam’s'Razor would suggest I look for a simpler, more logical explanation. In this case, “Microsoft Sucks”.

I’m at a paradox with this. Should I continue? Should I take it as a sign to back off?What are your thoughts? Leave your comments below.

One of the interesting challenges that a lot of people have is being punctual. We tend to run late and unless you live in Key West, where things run on Island Time where what time you show up, just doesn’t matter. People even have trouble guessing how much time has elapsed or how long things will take.

I however seem to have an internal clock that is insanely accurate. I have a quasi-game I play with my wife, where I insist on stupidly accurate numbers as any good science loving geek would do.  Relative to this post, I tend to give time estimates to an accuracy with in a minute, such as: I’ll be there in 17 minutes. What’s odd, is I tend to be correct within that minutes.

Today I pulled two time estimates out of my proverbial derriere. We were in Virginia Beach and my oldest son, Brandon wanted to be texted when we we left. I texted him: “We will be home at 8:52″. We were over 3.5-4 hours away depending on traffic, weather, stops and so on. The SUV was put into park at 8:53:15, a mere 16 seconds over my estimate. Maybe it was the extra nature stop that I didn’t plan for or it was the two cars that turned in front of us as we entered our neighborhood (delayed us by about 15 seconds). A 3.5+ hour drive nailed to a 30 second window.

This isn’t the first time I’ve done this. Its happens more often than not.

But I’m perhaps more surprised at my other time estimate that at around 2:59pm, earlier in the day my oldest son called wanting to know when we would show up. We still had not had lunch with my younger, hockey playing son. There is no telling how long lunch would take. Chris was not even out of the locker room yet. There is no idea how long the goodbye hugs would take. With no reference point on when we would leave, but I told Brandon “We will be there between 8:45 and 9:00pm”. So off to lunch, hugs good bye, and we were on the road.

8:52:30 was the mid-point of that original estimate. So not only did we pull in within one minute of my mid-point that I texted my son once we were on the road, but I pulled that 15 minute window seemingly totally out of the air.

Yea, bow to my inner-clock.

Now to figure out how to get people to use accurate times on mircowaves and let the the time expire instead of leaving 9 seconds on the clock for the next person.

(Evil Laugh!!!)