Saturday, October 26, 2013

Picard and Gandalf in Infinite Loop

While we waited for Godot, Captain Jean-Luc Picard (notable for commanding U.S.S. Enterprise NCC-1701-D) and Gandalf (best remembered for leading the Jews out of Egypt) performed a staged version of Groundhog Day for family and friends. Seeing as Godot never arrived, despite his multiple promises, I suppose it was just as well. However, since it turns out I'm not writing an article for The Onion, here's what really happened:

[Professor Plum with the rope in the Ballroom]

Last night I learned that a perk of being friends with Theatre people is that you might occasionally get invited to an invitation-only performance of something you actually want to see. In this case, the dress-rehearsal of Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, starring Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen, who were periodically interrupted by other actors passing through the set. To be fair, the others were very very good, they just weren't British knights, you might say. Stewart and McKellen staged the same production at a West End theatre in London back in 2009, so clearly it's a love project for these two men in their early to mid-70's, and it shows.

via Ian McKellen's Twitter

My Review


I don't really want to write a review of the play; there will no doubt be plenty of reviews by the time it opens. I enjoyed it very much, thought it had interesting commentary on our relationship with time, and would recommend it to almost anyone, but I'd rather write about the experience.

My Experience


This was only the second Broadway show I'd ever been to. The first was Les Misérables in 2000, which, my god, was amazing and made the 14 year-old Bret realize not all theatre was as terrible as The King and I or A Christmas Carol (apologies if you hold those in high regard as great theatre, and please don't invite me to your favorite Sarah Ruhl play either). I actually asked my dad and Jill if they would just let me stay home alone, to do nothing, instead of going to Les Misérables, but they insisted it would be good for me to experience "culture" or something.

We sat on the balcony level and the 1417 seat Imperial Theatre actually felt small to me, but perhaps that is a reflection of how unsuited the previous venues I had attended were for live theatre. I only specifically remember a few numbers such as Castle on a Cloud, Master of the House, and Do You Hear the People Sing, but it's more about the feeling I came away with, and how it made me more receptive to theatre in general.

Waiting for Godot and Les Misérables are as dissimilar as me and my 14 year old self. I have seen quite a bit of theatre in the last 13 years, but most of it has been either college, or very far off Broadway professional productions. Last night, when Sir Ian McKellen literally climbed on stage, it was magical. He legitimately could have been mistaken as a homeless man on the street, but it was the way he moved that really catches your eye. "Oh, this is what real acting is like," I thought to myself. I kept trying to imagine someone else playing his role, but all I could imagine was a caricature of the part. "You can't help but watch him" seemed to be the general consensus of everyone.

Sir Patrick Stewart is a commanding presence, which I guess ins't surprising considering his history of playing Shakespearean kings. He draws your attention more with his delivery than his physical movements. I will say, I never thought about Captain Picard during his performance, and coming from me, that's a huge compliment. I mean, come on, Star Trek is unquestionably the reason I wanted to see it.

I would be interested in hearing thoughts about the performance from my actor friends, but in much the same way that Les Mis helped me appreciate theatre in general, I might say Waiting for Godot helped me appreciate stage acting. Seeing two masters of their profession interact and perform is refreshing and heart-warming. With their final bow, a little dance, and tip of the hat, perhaps they were cluing the audience in that it's just as magical for them as it is for us.

Post Waiting [for Godot]


Liz and I met up with some friends at a bar afterwards. One person seemed distraught at my suggestion that she should drink something she likes instead of basing her decision on popular opinion, but it was an otherwise normal evening.

More Waiting


I'm convinced the A train knows when I'm waiting for it, and hates me. I'm also starting to suspect hope the subway is run by Ommpa Loompas who use tiny doors to move around and terrorize children. Liz didn't want to, but I made her go stand in front of a door for scale reference.
We came back, bought a frozen pizza on the way to my apartment, and watched Frasier while it cooked. So... after you've waited about 25 minutes for an oven to pre-heat and cook a pizza, pretty much the most disappointing thing you can do is then accidentally flip that pizza over and drop it on the bottom of the oven, and find when you're able to get the pizza flipped back over, all of the cheese, sauce, and pepperonis have detached themselves from the crust, and found a new home in the crack between the oven door.

I mean, we tried to eat it pretending it was a big round breadstick, but it just wasn't very satisfying. So, pizza bites to the rescue!

Unfortunately, patience was running thin, so we microwaved them instead of cleaning and reusing the oven. Microwaved pizza bites just won't make you feel better about life very often. On the other hand, they are technically food, and they will help you acknowledge that it is, indeed, time to cut your losses and go to bed.

Saturday, October 19, 2013

Stack Exchange or: How I learned to love Q&A and stop visiting Yahoo Answers.

(Part I)


I've been thinking about starting a separate blog which would be more technical and software-related in nature, but for now, I wanted to explain to my non-software friends (who often ask about my work and whether Stack Exchange is a typo) why Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow are important to people like me, and might even be useful to you, too.

My typical I-don't-know-how-to-describe-this-but-I'll-try-to-sum-it-up-in-a-way-that's-short-and-understandable-yet-without-any-context-which-would-have-been-useful-in-giving-you-a-sense-of-the-company description goes like this: "They run a bunch of Q&A sites on the internet and a job board for tech jobs - primarily software development jobs."  While that isn't dishonest, it doesn't answer how it's different from Yahoo Answers, how our job board is different from any other job board ever, or why it would be such a great place to work. So let's start with the first, and most important, question in this edition of The Spolsky [coding] Horror Picture Show - Part I.

How is it different from Yahoo Answers?


If I ever invite you to Stack Exchange headquarters, seriously, don't ask this question. The one time I've seen it asked, our HR manager threatened to kick him out of the building, followed by everyone walking away from the table.

When I started writing this (a couple weeks ago), the most recent question on Yahoo Answers was Where can I get marijuana seeds in miami? followed by other gems such as:
And those are just questions asked in the last 17 minutes.

The most recent question on stackoverflow.com is Cannot set socket to nonblocking ...okay, so that probably isn't a helpful comparison for non-programmers. Here are some recent questions on other Stack Exchange sites:

Alright, so maybe you're thinking our sites kind of look like Yahoo Answers-style sites without the terrible questions and generally devoid of internet trolls, but why? I could go on about how our unofficial mission is to improve the quality of information of the internet, but here's the simple answer from my personal perspective:
We let the community of each site build and moderate itself.
... and if the community can't do either, or both, we shut it down.


Area 51 (alien site[ings] are neither confirmed nor denied)


A site begins its life as an Area 51 proposal where someone suggests an idea. Let's just pretend for a moment that I had an interest in aviation, and I think the world would benefit from a Stack Exchange site for flying. So I propose an "Aviation and Aerospace" site and I start telling my pilot friends about it. They follow my proposal and add "sample questions" which they think would be a good fit for this site. The sample questions are important because they help define what would be on-topic for the site. Everyone can vote on questions they like best and when 40 questions have at least 10 up-votes, the proposal is considered "defined."

Next, people are asked to commit to the proposal. While waiting for at least 200 people to commit, there is some final discussion during this phase where, for example, someone might point out that the scope of the sample questions relates very little to the aerospace industry, and perhaps a better name for the site would simply be "Aviation." The general idea is that we don't want to launch a site until we understand what it's going to be about, and know there are going to be people using it.

If my aviation proposal makes it through the commitment phase, we will launch aviation.stackexchange.com on a probationary basis (the beta phase). This gives us a chance to see whether or not the site works in reality. If very few people ask questions, or questions go unanswered, we shut it down. If the questions or answers are of low quality (in other words, it doesn't look like the site is going to improve the quality of knowledge on the internet) we shut it down. However, if the community is successful, we promote it to a new permanent site.

Quick side note: What do we mean by quality questions? Here's how one of our other developers put it:
SE Q's are different because they are objective (answerable) and show attempts to answer before asking
Nick Larsen (@fody) October 19, 2013
Now, if I really wanted to be a moderator on my new aviation site, I could come up with a platform (explanation of how I would moderate and handle conflicts) and have people vote for me. We let sites elect their own moderators because it puts the responsibility for maintaining good content in the hands of the passionate individuals who are knowledgeable in the subject area. It would be cost-prohibitive for us to pay employees to do all the moderation work, and why would we when the community actually does a better job anyway?

Of course, there's even more to it; reputation, badges, meta sites, Creative Commons License (like Wikipedia, users can edit other users questions and answers), chat, etc, but I think you get the gist. If you're interested in knowing more about how it works, read our about page or the Area 51 FAQ. And, even better, if we have a community based around a subject which interests you, join the community! If we don't, consider advocating for a new Stack Exchange site. Right now I'm part of the Aviation site proposal (Surprising, I know... sadly, I'm not actually the one who proposed it, though).




Stack Exchange: Rendezvous at Big Gulch will return in Part II: The Sequel.