Laura and I went to watch part of a nearby collegiate ballroom dance
competition, and were pleased to discover that we haven't lost that most
important attribute: petty cattiness. Who cares if our style is getting sloppy
as long as we can watch other people with sloppy style and verbally
rip them apart? Given that, I suspect we'd have no problem jumping back into
the competitive circuit. (In fairness to us, these were people dancing several
levels above where we ever danced, so their style really should have been much
better.)
But in all seriousness, it was a lot of fun. There were a few couples that
were very good and were a lot of fun to watch, and we caught some of the fun
events (the ubiquitous reverse-lead Cha-Cha being one of them), which are great
to watch and reminded us of some of the fun parts of competitions. And hopefully
watching and doing a bit of dancing during the general dances will finally goad
us into finding some new lessons so we start dancing regularly again.
It would just be for fun though; watching the comp was entertaining, but we
don't really want to get back into that circuit.
But if we did, we could totally kick some of their butts.
Category: Random
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So I'm about a third of the way through iWoz,
and while some of the stories are certainly interesting I found myself getting
irritated as I read it and tried to figure out why. At some level it's perhaps
all his commentary on how great a lot of the stuff he did was, but mostly that
doesn't bother me so much. Clearly, a lot of the stuff he did was in fact really
cool, and clearly he is really smart, so that seems reasonable (even if he could
have perhaps spend a little less time drawing attention to just how great he
is).
But I realized that what really bothers me that it's that he's not
very honest about himself. An illustrative example, starting with
a passage from the beginning of the book about how his childhood shaped him:
[...] my dad believed in honesty. Extreme honesty. Extreme
ethics, really. That's the biggest thing he taught me. He used to tell me that
it was worse to lie about doing something bad under oath than it was to actually
do something bad [...] That really sunk in. I never
lie, even to this day. Not even a little.
Then later, this passage from when he and The Other Steve are approached
(completely coincidentally, although he didn't yet know it) by police officers
just after making illegal Blue Box calls from a pay phone:
But then the cop turned back to us and patted us down. He felt
my Blue Box and I pulled it out of my pocket and showed it to him. We knew we
were caught. The cop asked me what it was. I was not about to say “Oh,
this is a Blue Box for making free telephone calls.” So for some reason I
said it was an electronic music synthesizer.
And then after convincing them of the above:
The internal joy I felt when the cop believed our story about
the Blue Box being the Moog synthesizer is almost indescribable. Not only were
we not arrested for making illegal calls with or owning a Blue Box, but these
supposedly intelligent cops had bought our B.S.
Um, what? Someone who gloats to himself (and now an audience of millions)
about how cool it was to lie to the police to avoid the consequences of doing
something he knew to be illegal at the time is not a practitioner of
“extreme ethics”, and I'm pretty sure that lying to the police
isn't consistent with never lying “even a little”. And it's not
just the dishonesty, but the sense that he's taking something away from
others—yes, he's clearly a gifted engineer, so talking about that is fine.
But there are people out there who genuinely are extremely ethical, and this
just feels to me like he's robbing them of something in order to claim a virtue
that he doesn't really seem to posses, rather than being satisfied with the
(remarkable) things that he legitimately did accomplish.
I guess what it comes down to is that I can respect pride, but when it
crosses into unfounded ego it's not so respectable.
Category: A & E
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