All Hallow's Phew

Gave a presentation this AM primarily on the books The Challenger Launch Decision by Diane Vaughan and Normal Accidents by Charles Perrow. We¹ ended up going the power point presentation route. Two years of medical school did a lot of things to my fragile being, and one of them was endowing a revulsion of luminescent blue background slides. Alas, it was a good decision; I was discussing media presentation anyways, so it was good to have quick links to videos. Hey, speaking of, if you want to have a first hand artificial experience of my artificial presentation, well, you can just look at the slides directly:

Nyet's Part of the Presentation

So that's first hand evidence of the junk I'm doing in our HSD class. Wasn't the best presentation in the history of ever, but you do what you can. I did manage to incorporate baseball decision theory into the mix, always a plus.

So that was the morning. We grabbed some lunch, I did a little work at school, and then was going to go early vote but was told that there was a four hour wait @ Scottsdale City Hall... so I'll just get up super early on Tuesday and drive up there to vote like a normal citizen. I headed to Walgreens to get trick or treater candy and some fluoxetine for Sp-izz-arkle. I'm currently awaiting the pitter patter of youthful ghouls, but have had nary a visitor.

I just did a quick search on the blog and CAN'T BELIEVE I haven't accounted for this somewhere. When we were in Grafton, so this was probably in 2005 CE aka 1 BB (Before Blog), I came home and had completely forgotten it was All Hallow's Eve. So when a bunch of freaks rang our doorbell at 5:30, not only was I surprised but I had no candy to give them. I felt terrible - being the enculturated rule-following doofus that I am - so I scoured the kitchen and found a granola bar. That was lame, so I remembered that there were two dollars in my wallet. I gave the goblin a granola bar, and got a "oh... thanks." But then I gave him two dollars and told him there was a gas station down the street where he could buy candy. I don't know what kind of priming (anti-priming?) effect the granola bar had, but the kid LOST it - "OH MY GOD DAD GUESS WHAT THAT GUY GAVE ME YEEEEEAAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHH!" So it was cool to have gifted that much happiness, but I also wanted to vomit a little because of that eight year old capitalist lust. Oh, well.

UPDATE - So far tonight the only excitement has been a trio of masked ghouls using pillowcases for their candy. A very efficient and business-like trick or treat transaction was made. They may or may not have said "hello" or "thanks." Sigh...

¹ Many props to my presentation partner, HSDer Sharlissa who bucked the Nyet's Presentation Partner Trend and 1) Read the Books, 2) Thought About the Books, and 3) Worked on a Presentation on the Books 3a) Before 8:45 on the Morning of the Presentation. Solid work.