The Mandelbear's Musings

I seem to have more notes than I usually do at a con. Possibly due to the fact that I'm spending more down time. The lobby (where the bar is) and mezzanine (where the programming is) are connected, and incredibly noisy. That's probably a large part of why I ran out of spoons around 10pm and went upstairs to bed. That, the fact that something in dinner wasn't sitting well, and that I'd just spent two hours in the room waiting for the hotel to clean up the mess made by the overflowed toilet.

The apparent problem with the phone was just pilot error -- it's cordless, and I didn't press the talk button. Not so much as "idiot bear" as totally overloaded and flustered, and perfectly willing to believe that One More Thing was going wrong.

... so I didn't get to any of the concerts.

I did get a couple of nice strokes, though -- one person told me that one of his coworkers has a copy of my book on his desk, and another told me that she'd used my River posts about the care and feeding of geeks to understand and deal with a coworker. Those felt good.

Lots of people seem to know me by name who I don't recognize at all. "He's losing his memory and some of his hair"? That's somewhat disturbing.

It was a good day for most of it, I ended the day feeling seriously down and drained. This was almost certainly a simple matter of being out of spoons rather than depression -- I'm ok now. I think it's hard for me to distinguish physical exhaustion from sensory overload from emotional depression, though. That's something I'm going to have to work on.

A couple of links.

It's been a while since I posted anything with a significant amount of River content; little things like life, the universe, and everything have been conspiring against me. I'm sorry to disappoint you again, but it seemed as though this was a good time for a sort of re-introduction and status report before we continue our journey.

The River posts started out as a journey of personal exploration, concentrating on mental states, emotions in particular, interpersonal communication, and relationships. Along the way they seem to have acquired a second theme of advice, primarily for geeks like me and people in relationships with geeks. (I'll get into definitions in a little while.) How this geeky old bear found himself in the role of slightly bemused relationship counselor is a longish story that has yet to be told in full, but you'll find bits of it in the archives if you're curious.

There seem to be three main types of River posts. There are, of course, general posts that have a brief mention of a River-related topic -- those usually just get the tag. There are the ones that report on, and usually analyze, a specific incident or event from a riparian point of view -- often these have the phrase "on the River" in their title. And finally there are the more carefully-considered posts, of the sort cflute calls "The Mandelbear waxes philosophical", which usually have titles that start with the "River:" keyword.

At any given time I may have a half-dozen or so posts in various stages of writing, and another dozen in the form of a title and a few notes. They often stay in this state for months, until I either get tired of beating on them, or they get triggered by some event, usually on my friends list, that makes them suddenly relevant.

Definitions:

Although there are plenty of terms I use in a somewhat non-standard sense here on the River, the only two I want to highlight here are geek and human. I believe I first started using the pair of them in a technical sense in a post titled Humans are from Earth, geeks are from Saturn.

Geek

This is intended as a humorously self-deprecating, fairly general term that covers anyone who, like me, has trouble relating to and getting along with "normal" people. It covers a fairly wide range, including aspies, people with adult ADD, loners, and in some aspects people who are simply terribly shy. Geeks often have an easier time relating to computers than to people; some of my earlier posts have mentioned "hackers" in this connection.

Human

This is meant as a less disparaging term for "normal" people than things like "neurotypical", which is common in the Aspie community.

I'll note immediately that I'm well aware that many people -- probably including most of my readers, fall somewhere in between the two categories, or have aspects of one or the other in different situations.

Sub-tags:

Here are the tags commonly used for River subtopics. This set changes over time, and posts will occasionally have tags that are used more widely.

c9n

Calibration -- getting or soliciting feedback or corrections (outside of LJ -- inside LJ I'd use "query"). You may have met the practice of using a number to stand for the number of omitted letters in "i18n", the common abbreviation for "internationalization".

comm

Communication

def

Definitions. Often also have "Defining my terms:" in the title.

human

The whole "being human" thing (usually in the context of my abject failure at it).

meta

A post about posting. This post, for example.

np

N-person relationships (where n>2). The definition of np-complete and np-hard are left as an exercise for the reader.

psa

Public Service Announcement. Something I want people to know about me.

psych

Psychology, including mental states, psychopharmacology, and so on.

query

Questions of the readership, often for calibration purposes.

rel

Relationship

Books?

The River seems to have spawned some related writing projects. The first, thought of a couple of months ago and introduced in a post titled The River: it's not just a tag anymore, was the comparatively straightforward idea of turning the first year's worth of posts and some selected comments into a book, A Year on the River. It will require some serious editing, of course.

The second, and more recent (as in just this week), is the idea of writing a pair of somewhat more organized self-help books, tentatively titled Relating to Humans -- A Manual for Geeks and Relating to Geeks -- A Manual Mostly for Humans. I envision them being printed back-to-back, like one of the old Ace Doubles. Anybody else remember those? It would make sense because, as I've noted above, many people fall somewhere in the middle. And, of course, because geeks have most of the same problems relating to other geeks that humans do.

(The initial phrase, currently "Relating to", is up for grabs; additional possibilities include "Living with" and "The Care and Feeding of".)

Naturally, both of these projects will start out as wiki-like websites, so that I can get some help -- I'll need it.

Hackers are used to working with computers, which are fast, accurate, and extremely literal-minded. A hacker knows, deep down in his guts, that if something is wrong with the program he's writing, it's his fault. The normal human mechanisms of blame-shifting and denial don't come into play at all: the only thing to do is fix the problem and move on.

This means that if you can point out something that the hacker in your life is doing wrong, there's an excellent chance that he'll get to work on it. My father provided a good example of this: he discovered that he didn't have anything to talk about besides technology. That's fine with other techies, but not very helpful at cocktail parties. Someone else (um... \me looks in mirror and clears throat) might have stuck to his own kind, or crawled off into a corner to read.

Dad, instead, made himself an expert on wine, with a sideline in hotels and restaurants around the world. By the time I was in high school he had a notebook with not only the best places to eat and places to stay in hundreds of cities, but which rooms had the best view.

I do have to warn you that there's a downside to dealing with machines a lot of the time: it's safe to yell at a machine, because it has no feelings to hurt. There's anger there, but it's not really directed at the machine -- it's really directed at himself. How could he possibly have been so stupid? A few minutes later, of course, he'll figure out exactly how, and by the end of the day he'll be happily telling the story of his own stupidity, and his clever fix for it, to anyone who stands still long enough to listen. Just something to watch out for.

(Side note: I'm going to change focus of this series from geeks in general to hackers/computer geeks, because that's really the only subspecies I'm familiar with.)

From this post by the ever-fascinating cadhla we get a link to The Nerd Handbook. While not quite an operating manual for your friendly local Mandelbear, it comes pretty close.

I'll write one specifically for me in my copious spare time.