http://tollenaar.tumblr.com/

Turns out that I’m just not very interesting.

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 00:03:45 -0800

Turns out that I’m just not very interesting.

cosmo tip #524

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 11:05:28 -0800

expertcosmotips:

reward him after sex by placing him on your myspace top 8

I view, but I don't use.

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 02:54:07 -0700

Like life, I’m a little temperamental.

You too… you all, too. Because that’s just what we do.

Things are fine, and I hope yer fine, too.

Push the cards

Sat, 29 Sep 2012 15:04:33 -0700

You know?

"The planet does not need more ‘successful people’. The planet desperately needs more peacemakers,..."

Mon, 17 Sep 2012 18:09:20 -0700

“The planet does not need more ‘successful people’. The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers and lovers of all kinds. It needs people to live well in their places. It needs people with moral courage willing to join the struggle to make the world habitable and humane and these qualities have little to do with success as our culture is the set.”

- Tenzin Gyatso, The 14th Dalai Lama (via Swanfeather Songs)

Uh, what?

Thu, 30 Aug 2012 00:59:12 -0700

While holding an open copy of The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Classical Mythology in one hand and plucking away at a keyboard with another, my cell phone goes hot. I recognize the number as Sheldon’s and feel a great relief in knowing that the conversation will be carried with the kind of brevity that stern talkings-to require. Ten minutes until the assignment deadline which I’ve only just begun and I really can’t afford the distractions, nor can I afford airline tickets and feasible schedule alterations at work - hence the call.

“Quit that fucking job. Just quit it. Tell your boss to fuck himself, or tell him to call me so I can say it. You know I’m connected, and you know I can have you newer, better job in a matter of days. So just quit.”

Labor Day weekend begins Friday and that means one thing: Vantage, WA. It’s been a few years since my last appearance, and so I owe it to everyone, my youngest sister most of all (who is making her first trip this year). Because of finances, and because of conflict with work, by all appearances I would have to gracefully bow out yet another year. I think that the excuses, no matter their supreme validity (despite their unfairness) are simply inexcusable at this point. It is a relief to see that I’m not the only one who feels this way.

The simple facts are this: at Bumsted’s I had three shifts to cover. Friday close, Saturday mid, and Sunday open. Due to short staffing it is nearly impossible to have this shifts covered matter-of-factly. Friday required getting one cook to stay two hours over his opening shift and having another part-time employee cover the remainder, but only under the condition that he was the first cut closer. Saturday required twenty bones to get a closing man in three hours early. Sunday - because somethings are just - was a simple ‘ask and you shall receive’ incident.

This left one four hour day shift to cover at the other gig. From the start this was my only easy-out, and I’d made sure to set it up early. Somehow, despite the simplicity of the request, it can no longer be met. I’m not even sure why, my only indication being, “Hey, sorry man, I just can’t do it.” That’s all good and great, man, and you just cost me $500.

My entire flight schedule is dependent on this single failure to cover a shift (something, I assure you, I am owed). The reason for this is that I have one counterpart at work - if both of us were to hypothetically fall ill, there is literally no-one to fill in at our position. There isn’t even another employee to step in and try to fake it. Owners included we rock a five-man crew in a restaurant that requires a constant on-clock staff of four. There are no back-ups. It’s called poor staffing and business structure, but hey, it’s not my rodeo apparently. I just wave the flag and make the bulls charge, never mind should anyone get stomped. The conditions are rough to deal with in times like these, and what little sympathy is found certainly lacks. I really ought to quit.

My hang-ups are there, though. Barring this kind of bullshit, the owners are excellent. They’ve done everything above and beyond what I’d ever have expected to help me in times of need. They cancelled a new hire’s training to give me my job back after an ill-attempt of relocating. They’ve offered me living arrangements… they’ve contributed to helping me solve many great personal problems. They’re great people who care greatly about their employees. They just don’t care much about our vacations, all one day of them.

I do have my suspicions though… suspicions that I’m levied against more heavily than my two coworkers because of my experience and status. I’m first in line to run the place, should the need arise, and I’m the one - well above the others - that is reliant. I’ve earned all the badges and am worthy. They’ve received an amount of attentiveness from me that is rare in any industry, but as with many before them, I feel they may be beginning to expect too much of a good thing and are now sternly trying to reign it in and milk it for all it’s worth.

Sheldon hit the nail on the head: I should quit. Want to quit, really. But because of the unpreparedness… because of the inability of these good people to fully thrive in good times without their reliance on me, my morals are telling me know. I’m unsure as to how I should actually feel about this because logically it makes sense, but in my gut (and a tad in that vascular-doo-hickey heart thing) it feels incorrect. Shit, they’re about to be first time parents for God’s sake. They have a rough enough time without the little squirt - and you can bet your ass that to carry on, they’re going to need me at the reigns when one of them is gone.

I feel like I deserve to move on to something better.

I feel like they don’t deserve my abandonment, at least not now.

I feel really uncertain about what to do. Everyone else has their mind made up for me, and they’ve all chimed in with the resounding ‘quit!’

Not sure if my heart is hearing it correctly.

I just want to tell you how beautiful you are, but I can’t. I can’t, because I...

Tue, 14 Aug 2012 03:58:26 -0700

I just want to tell you how beautiful you are, but I can’t. I can’t, because I understand the implications. I can’t because I understand the complications. I can’t, because I understand how you feel.

But I want to, because I just don’t know how to change how I feel.

You’re beautiful, and I hope you feel that way. It’s all that you deserve. And I hope that someone makes you feel it.

Thought that I just saw you

Sun, 05 Aug 2012 00:11:25 -0700

Thought that I just saw you

freedomfaerie: Sorry, I know this is gross, but I really need...

Thu, 02 Aug 2012 17:38:24 -0700

freedomfaerie:

Sorry, I know this is gross, but I really need motivation to not smoke right now.

Gotta get dat…

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 14:25:26 -0700

Gotta get dat…

sirmitchell: “Sup”

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 02:18:30 -0700

sirmitchell:

“Sup”

I’ve seen the wicked fall madly in love, and so I know that we must be holding on to humanity,...

Mon, 30 Jul 2012 00:48:03 -0700

I’ve seen the wicked fall madly in love, and so I know that we must be holding on to humanity, still.

The process of working towards my business degree did not reveal much to me in the way of knowledge...

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 14:26:00 -0700

The process of working towards my business degree did not reveal much to me in the way of knowledge or experience. It has helped me to appreciate, however, that by enrolling in a bunch of bullshit 100 level classes at the local community college I will earn a sizable return in Pell Grant funding, and that this is about as low-risk of an investment as I can hope for. So, you know, I’m basically conning the federal government to pay me $2,000 cash monies to bullshit a couple of papers for the next 12 weeks (Introduction to Nutrition, are you kidding me? Mythology?!).

I’m going to use that money to pay off my existing loans with the federal government and use the rest to buy a bicycle and a few pairs of shoes.

Business.

Four’ll love you so much, but do me a favor baby, don’t reply. ‘Cause I can dish...

Sat, 21 Jul 2012 10:28:42 -0700

Four’ll love you so much, but do me a favor baby, don’t reply. ‘Cause I can dish it out, but I can’t take it.

lulz at girlz hitting on me

Thu, 19 Jul 2012 16:48:00 -0700

phonographh:

Thanks but no thanks.

edit: type a witty message about how we should trade lives for a little bit to correct our issues, facepalm when Tumblr only reblogs.

Life back in the Dirty T is going interestingly enough. I’m feeling a little displaced by all...

Tue, 17 Jul 2012 02:35:47 -0700

Life back in the Dirty T is going interestingly enough. I’m feeling a little displaced by all of this stagnation. Tucson, like most great college towns, bears the tragic burden of empty summers. When you work, play, and sleep in the heart of place that is driven by the continuous energy of whacked-out college kids trying to savor the last of their adolescence, and that energy becomes your constant, life can seem vacuous when that pace is lacking. It doesn’t help that it’s either scorching hot or storm, either alternative bringing about a relatively high level of discomfort, all of which is very much in your face.

But today fences have come crashing down and the Avenue has opened again, at least on our end. Soon a massive housing complex will open across the corner and usher in thousands of twenty-somethings who bear a heavy urge to spend their parents money on drinks. Shortly thereafter begins the new academic year.

My boss drunkenly confessed (his best yawping employed) that he’d love to see me behind the bar… that I have the ideal personality to be back their serving, and that I could do it as well as anyone else he’d known if I’d knew how to mix a fucking cocktail. I can mix a few, though I’m hoping he’d run the risk of teaching me to mix a few more and give me a shot at it.

That plausibility seems to come to us at a strange time wherein a few coworkers and I had taken upon ourselves the task - also a result of my boss’s alcohol infused banter - to explore avenues of redefining our bar as a legitimate drinking hotspot on 4th. We’re a restaurant, and a fairly formidable one at that… during the appropriate seasons of course, but we’re undeniably lacking at the bar when compared to the whole of our competition. We’re a bar for opening the night, and seldom for ending it. Our communal hope is to see that changed.

I hope that spirits can remain high and that we can find the perseverance to see this thing through, that when life should resume it’s exciting state that we shall have found transcendence. And three cheers to hoping that I’ll have a heavy hand in the drunkest of times to come.

ummhello: One Kearny Lobby, IwamotoScott

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 15:41:42 -0700

ummhello:

One Kearny Lobby, IwamotoScott

Write something deep and/or therapeutic...

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 01:40:46 -0700

Save as draft.

physicsphysics: Listen to the Higgs Boson. Who would have...

Wed, 11 Jul 2012 01:27:28 -0700

physicsphysics:

Listen to the Higgs Boson.

Who would have thought that the sound of God would tune on a habanera rhythm?

Researchers say they have “sonified” the data from the Atlas experiment at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) in Switzerland, making it possible to “hear” the newly discovered Higgs Boson-like particle, dubbed the “God particle” by Nobel-prize winning physicist Leon Lederman.

The result is a melody which resembles the dotted rhythm of the habanera, a Cuban dance which became popular in Spain in the early 19th century.

On Wednesday July 4, scientists at CERN announced that they had found a Higgs-like particle after analyzing results from the Large Hadron Collider. Researchers detected a “bump” in their data corresponding to a particle weighing in at 126 gigaelectronvolts (GeV), consistent with the Higgs Boson, which is believed to give mass to all other particles.

“As soon as the announcement was made, we begun working on the sonification of the experimental data,” Domenico Vicinanza, product manager at Dante (Delivery of Advanced Network Technology to Europe), Cambridge, UK, told Discovery News.

Vicinanza led the Higgs sonification project collaborating with Mariapaola Sorrentino of ASTRA Project (Cambridge), who contributed to the sonification process, and Giuseppe La Rocca (INFN Catania), who was in charge of the computing framework.

“Sonification worked by attaching a musical note to each data. So, when you hear the resulting melody you really are hearing the data,” Vicinanza said.

The researchers mapped intervals between values in the original data set to interval between notes in the melody. The same numerical value was associated to the same note. As the values increased or decreased, the pitch of the notes grew or diminished accordingly.

“In this way any regularity in the scientific data can be naturally mapped to the melody: if the data are periodic (they are marked by a repeated cycle) the sonification will be a music melody which will have the same periodicity and regularity,” Vicinanza said.

In the sonification, each semiquaver corresponded to an increase of 5 gigaelectronvolts (GeV). The detection of the Higgs-like particle around the 126 gigaelectronvolt mass-energy range (GeV), was then expressed by a peak made of three high notes (about 3.5 seconds into the recording).

The bump corresponding to the new particle is represented by an F note which is two octaves above the preceding F note, a C which is the most acute note in the music (also two octaves above the subsequent C note) representing the peak of the Higgs, and a E note.

“The discovery of the Higgs-like particle is a major step forward in our knowledge of the world around us. By using sonification we are able to make this breakthrough easier to understand by the general public,” Vicinanza said.

Amazingly, the sonification produced a habanera-like music.

“After hearing the piano solo version, I created another version, more in tone with the resulting melody. I added bass, percussion, marimba and xylophone,” Vicinanza said.

Particularly useful when dealing with complex, high-dimensional data, sonification requires enormous amounts of networking and processing power to produce results. To create the Higgs melody, the researchers relied on high-speed research networks including the pan-European GÉANT network, which operates at speed of up to 40Gbps (it will become 100Gb/s by early 2013) and the EGI grid computing infrastructure, which works by linking together multiple computers in different locations via high speed networks.

“Neither the discovery of the particle or this sonification process would have been possible without the high speed research networks that connect scientists across the world, enabling them to collaborate, analyze data and share their results,” Vicinanza said.

Bad Sneakers

Sun, 08 Jul 2012 22:16:59 -0700

Bad Sneakers