damned if you do...

...or potentially so.

Earlier today I was at work. This lady calls up and says, "Mr. Brown
is here from XYZ company and needs to get on our wireless network.
It's asking for credentials. What are they?"

After the usual verification stuff, I tell her the password he'll
need. She says, with a slight edge suggesting that she wants to make
darned sure she understands me right, "That's ALL he's going to need
to enter? Nothing else?" "Nope," I say, and I hear "Okay, thanks,"
and the click of her hanging up. I continued talking to the phone as
I also hung up: "unless, of course, he's got one of those clients
that defaults to 64 bits instead of 128 bits in which case he'll need
to look for that setting on whatever client he's got and change it to
the other one... but if that's the case I'll find out soon enough
because you'll call back."

Then I hear a very soft snicker on the other side of the cubicle and
begin to laugh to myself, because I realized I hadn't given her all
the information he /might/ need, not because I was trying to screw
anyone, but because I knew the chances of him /having/ that type of
client were likely slim. In the past, I'd give too MUCH information
just to be safe, and end up confusing the dickens out of someone
because 9 times out of 10 they didn't need the information in the
first place. 'Tis best, at times, to leave out typically-unimportant
information and provide it on a need-to-know basis even if it means
someone has to call back (which makes me appreciate having to call
people back, now - the person was being thoughtful about my level of
understanding by refusing to confuse me with a bunch of inapplicable
crap). Still, I had to voice this concern, so I made it known to
myself as a muttered sidenote aimed at her hang-up click.

I.T. support is an art form. In addition to reading minds, we have to
quickly disseminate only needed information for equipment we can only
make guesses at while an agreeable but intensely busy person on the
other end waits for your pleasantly helpful voice to spew forth easy-
to-understand, nontechnical information that's highly complex and
technical in nature.

~nv

synesthesia

I know someone who has this - where he hears music and sees colour.

http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2010/01/synesthesia_and_the_mcgurk_eff.php

SPOILER BELOW... if you want to listen and watch for yourself, you can
read this after you're done...

The interesting thing about what occurred when I watched:

1. neat, neat?, peat, peat. neat, neat, peat, peat
2. neat, neat, peat, peat. neat, neat, peat, peat

Note "neat?" is where he says people hear "meat." I /did/ think I
heard meat, but it sounded too nasalised, and I was very very confused
by the fact the lips didn't match perfectly what I was hearing. It
was like it was out of synch or something. At first I figured I heard
him wrong, began comparing what I'd seen to his voice as I watched the
next word come forth, couldn't figure out why the sound was off so
badly that it didn't match the sound correctly, and ultimately
concluded that he'd said "neat." I based this on context, because he
never said he was going to say "meat" but /had/ mentioned the word
"neat" and repeated it later on.

After I got myself all confused, I found myself reading below as I
listened to and half-watched the second part, and realized he /had/
said "neat" and that he was superimposing his speech on top of an
original recording of "neat, peat, neat, peat."

So: In short, I /did/ do what he said most people do, but due to the
synchronization problem, I wasn't 100% certain I heard him correctly.
Then I pulled a CAPD compensation and found "neat" was the only
obvious word he could have used in that strange context, so I fixed
what I heard with what I thought I should have heard.

If he /had/ said "meat" with the same synchronization issue, I likely
would have gotten that wrong, especially after I'd heard the whole
thing.

~nv

Dream Last Night

Childhood classmate and friend, Jen, and I were adults in a schoolroom
and reminiscing. Suddenly I hugged her, very glad to see her again,
and she said something about always having been there and not going
anywhere. I said, "I miss the past, not some of the things in it." I
woke up, very much desiring to remember that line, and found that I'd
been crying, truly happy to have seen her so vividly again and sad
that it wasn't real. WTF? I kept repeating that line over and over
as I fell back to sleep, though, and... there it is. So succinct...

Full Circle Writing

Yep, me again, talking about the importance of proper writing skills.
Today it was inspired by this site, which speaks of handwriting: http://www.hopechestlegacy.com/index.php?page=writing-desks

It has just dawned on me how history often repeats itself, and how
things often come full-circle. Is this beginning to occur with
literacy in some places? Doing much genealogical research as of late,
I am quite familiar with the concept that last names were often
misspelled or misread during censuses, and how many folks were so
illiterate they scarcely could write their own names.

So is this how it is to be, then? A good majority of the populace
able to write well, but a tiny percentage in comparison able to write
properly? Shall we have scribes again?

I hope not.

~nv