Phthursday Musings: e f f i c i e n c y

Tuesday afternoon, 4:30.

I walk out of my office, across the house, open the door, go into the study room.

Boy is here. On one screen is Minecraft, on the other Youtube, but that one is paused.

Boy is standing, writing something on a dry erase board. He is not freaked out by my presence. It looks like he’s trying to… copy something down from Youtube? And he’s got a partial command on the Minecraft screen?

What’s he writing? I look down, and it reads:

efficiency

Alas, there were no Musings last week. It was a heavy week and Thursday was especially heavy. Work up until when it’s time to leave for baseball, leave baseball early to get home and run a PTO meeting, try and keep sane across all of these things happening in a compressed period of time. Writing just wasn’t happening.

Among other things I did last week which I don’t normally do too much of, I interviewed a guy. And then a couple more this week. We’re hiring, see. And I’m a manager, so I get to interview these people who want these jobs.

When I interview people, I don’t do what most people do. Anybody can ask questions about node.js or whatever. I figure, if they want me to interview somebody, they’re counting on me to get to the essence of a prospective hire. So I ask the important stuff: what their favorite kind of pie is, to expound upon the differences between Hot Wheels and Matchbox, and whether they agree that the buttery popcorn flavored Jelly Belly is a true abomination which should be eradicated from this and all other planets which might deign to consider themselves civilized.

Tricking!

Seriously though, I do ask questions nobody else seems to ask. One such question, lobbed to someone with a degree which justifies the question, is: Why did you want to get into computer science in the first place?

Well, friends, let me explain something important to you.

That boy on the other side of the house, writing efficiency on a white board?

He’s setting himself up better for a job than any of you might realize.

When I was his age there was no Minecraft. The closest thing we had to Minecraft was Q*bert.

Here’s a ridiculous three year old article I found when searching for Q*bert efficiency.

Here’s an even more ridiculous article, this one from 38 years ago.

Now, as it so happens, I had and still have a Q*bert cartridge for the TI 99/4A. Unlike the Atari version, the TI version is pretty much exactly in line with the arcade version. This, along with many other games, held my attention for countless hours when I was roughly the age that goofball is now.

I am hard-pressed to identify any actual TI 99/4A cartridge as somehow inspirational to my career, unless Personal Record Keeping somehow counts. Oh, maybe someone somewhere decided to enter the medical field after playing Microsurgeon (if so, I advise finding another doctor), or maybe someone has found a line of work blasting tumbleweeds after playing too much Tombstone City. Anyway, I wrote about all this at some length a couple of years ago, so I won’t rehash it all now.

Q*bert was a bit more transcendent than most games. It was a popular arcade game, and also ported to many video game systems, and the game play was fairly unique. It was 2-D, but it also kind of wasn’t. I could probably sit down on the floor and play it for a couple hours right now and be sufficiently absorbed. It’s hard enough when you get far enough along that the challenge can keep you going.

As wildly divergent as Q*bert and Minecraft are, I do feel like we’re “speaking the same language” when we talk about video games. It’s a variation on that old chestnut of a question about which decade was the one of the greatest change, right? Are things today more like they were in the ‘80s than the ‘80s were like what they were in the ‘50s? And while a whole lot of people would disagree, I think the answer is Yes.

I just now got an email from ABC with the subject “TONIGHT: Grey's Anatomy Bids Farewell to Jackson”.

• Why am I getting email from ABC?

• Grey’s Anatomy is still on the air?

• Who the hell is Jackson?

You know what this email is? It’s terribly inefficient. It’s sent me off wasting time mulling irrelevant questions. It forced me to spend a second hitting the Trash key.

You know who’s efficient? Here, I’ll show you:

I was so distressed by the time I had to waste deleting that email that I went to go look for mail, and saw a tiny bunny chowing down. See how the bunny is shrewd enough to hang out in the limited shade of the post! And then once full can immediately retreat under the deck to conserve more energy! This bunny is so efficient that it did not even exist a month ago, and two months from now, another one just like it will replace it. ABC needs to hire this bunny, stat. I understand they have a role to fill, what with Jackson leaving and all.

I’ve just been informed that the bunny’s name is Jerry.

Or Geri, or, um, Jheri?

Speaking of Jheri, did you know that the Godfather of Hair was born in Rantoul?

See how inefficient this section is? You don’t care that Jheri was born in Rantoul.

I then searched for famous people from Rantoul and am tickled to announce that on the list is one C. Adrian Pillars, sculptor.

Is there a better name for a sculptor than C. Adrian Pillars? I mean, a realistic one. People. It’s not like he could have been named Marble Chizzleworth, okay? Come on!

Here’s the official Minecraft wiki page about efficiency. It says “Efficiency is an enchantment that increases the player's mining speed.”

In the real world, I believe we call that methamphetamine.

I assume that if I were somewhere between one-ninth and one-third my current age that I would have taken to Minecraft as well. I have to admit though that I’m often mystified by the appeal. I feel like I can readily grasp the appeal of other video games, but there’s something about Minecraft generally which seems like… a much lesser version of a good set of Legos. Although I also don’t really understand the appeal of things like the Lego movies.

Speaking of which, this week I ascertained that a certain member of the household doesn’t know who Bugs Bunny is, and doesn’t know who the Wicked Witch of the West is, and I guess I might understand the latter, but isn’t the former really quite jarring? I mean, he knows who freaking Danger Mouse is. Not the producer, mind you. The world’s greatest rodent agent. Agent rodent? Too right.

This upcoming week I finally get back on the field myself. We’ll see if my body falls apart along the way. I hope not! But I’m definitely out of shape and have just been so worn out recently. Haven’t we all been? Maybe being on a field where I’m the one running around will provide that needed spark. Maybe you can tell, from what a hot mess this week’s installment has been, how much that spark is needed. Maybe I should ask Jheri the bunny for advice.

Hauling the boy around for games where I try to emphasize that the score doesn’t matter… is kind of making me itch to be out somewhere where it does.

For now, I guess I’ll send out this week’s installment, with a picture of a tiny bunny to try and draw people in to this madness.