my sevens
January 14th, 2007 Filed Under personal
I recently watched the Up Series, a 1964 BBC documentary interviewing a group of 7-year-old children from diverse backgrounds. The project now includes interviews at 14, 21 and every 7 years after, and is still ongoing (they are 49 in the last). The concept is brilliant and the director’s dogged devotion overtakes any flaws in execution.
I don’t think this level of documentation should be reserved for some chosen population sample, no matter how large. Any person who documents their life every 7 years will find their efforts amply rewarded. One night I sat down with my favorite drink and wrote mine in about two hours using this sevens brainstorm aid I created. I will soon collect pictures of myself at 7/14/21/28 and post them here.
7 up
Where are you going to school?
I’m in 3rd grade at St. John’s elementary school.
It’s a private school?
We have chapel every wednesday morning. We’re not really Lutheran, we go to sunday school sometimes in Elmhurst.
What are you good at?
I can type fast and read.
What do you enjoy doing?
Programming the computer. in BASIC on the TRS-80.
What about your parents?
My dad and mom talk really fast.
What’s your biggest fear?
I’m scared about going to heaven, forever and ever and ever.
14 up
It’s 1990 and I’m 14 years old, still living in the same house in Lombard, but I spent my 8th grade year at the public school, and I’m now a freshman at Glenbard East high school.
I still program the computer, all the time. I’ve been calling BBSes after dark when no customers are calling my dad looking for used office furniture. My parents are selling Amway and growing an organization.
I worked with my uncle on software to run an Amway business (in BASIC). My dad canceled the project at seemingly 75% because another software product had come out and did basically the same thing.
I wrote a Heating/AC invoice generator ($500) by myself in BASIC a year or two ago, and was working on an orthodontic billing system in Clipper/dbase, which I actually made good progress on, but found difficult and tedious and eventually stopped effort on it, much to my father’s disappointment.
The past two summers I’ve printed name badges for uncle gino’s high school reunion (class of ‘3x). I cut lawns in the neighborhood with a Reel lawn mower. I’m in the library chess club where I met my best friend Jonathan.
I’m in all of the freshman honors classes, and I couldn’t try out for the first play of the year, Steel Magnolias, because it only has parts for women. I do math contests and I am learning to program in assembly language. I have a crush on my spanish teacher, who just graduated and I think is 23. I’ve not kissed a girl yet. I got contacts.
21 up
I’m in my fourth/senior year at UIUC.
I’m the elected (by one vote) Chair of the local student chapter of ACM. We just hosted an impressive conference that I can not really take credit for.
Last summer I made $15/hour working at Neoglyphics, a web design company.
I just got my real ID so that I can drink; I was using a fake ID. I’m living with Paul, the Vice Chair of ACM, and Joey, my mostly ex-girlfriend, in an apartment very near DCL. I dropped acid at our halloween party. I’m still technically a theatre major, but am attending very few of the 4 classes this semester I’m taking, 2 of which I need to graduate with a degree in Computer Science.
A Black Russian is my favorite drink; Murphy’s the bar to get drinks. I’m that Ben Seaver kid. I love TMBG and Chopin. I’m active on #uiuc.
John Ahart, my directing teacher, is an inspiration.
My first semester at college I tried IVCF. Quickly I learned it was not a good way to meet girls and anyway, I wasn’t a very good Christian. I had since become something of an atheist, one day on a bus I started crying that there was no hope for me to live forever.
A year or two ago, I realized that change is the only constant.
I frequently find my lack of focus detrimental to the studies I have chosen. I get distracted easily by something I feel I know that I can do and will benefit the world.
28 up
I live in Seattle, having relocated here after college to work at Microsoft. I met Tara about 6 months after my 21st birthday, about 3 months before I graduated (by the skin of my teeth), and she came with me. We’re still together after almost 7 years, and we have a certificate of Domestic Partnership dated Jan 3, 2000. Tara and I live in one bedroom of a self-described kommune, with Jim and his girlfriend, Marijane, and a rotating fifth, sixth, and sometimes seventh housemate.
I started a company, called Paulgames, with my friend Paul from college, and though we effectively raised $20k and had a working prototype, it wasn’t enough and it fizzled in the lean post-dot-com years. We didn’t talk for several years, but now he comes over for poker.
I’m now working for CoCo, a startup making a mesh network protocol, to which my friend Ivan (who comes to Go Club) recruited me. I was just asked by Jeremy, the CTO, to be the protocol team lead, and so now I’m leading a team of about 6 engineers.
I’ve been reading about molecular biology and trying to develop board games that teach the fairly simple scientific principles through their mechanics.
Stumble it!my name change
November 3rd, 2006 Filed Under personal
In August 2006, I legally changed my name to ‘Saul Pwanson’. My birth name was, as you might have guessed, ‘Paul Swanson’. There are many Pauls in the world, and we’re all named after the first Paul, St. Paul who founded the Christian religion, nee Saul from Tarsus who enjoyed persecuting the original Jews for Jesus. One day, while on the road to Damascus, Saul was blinded by a bright light in the sky that told him Jesus was the real deal, and so he converted, spending the remainder of his life as the very first and very effective Christian evangelist. Without Paul, Christianity would have remained a small sect of Judaism.
The surname ‘Swanson’, as you would correctly presume, is Swedish, though of course no one knows for sure where exactly we came from. In Swedish, apparently “swan” means “serf”, so any Swanson is really just a peasant Swede, anti-royalty if you will. There are so many Swansons that my great-grandfather, a Swanson, married a woman, also a Swanson, and they weren’t even remotely related, or so I’m told. My family can’t trace its history back to the immigation boat, let alone a plot of land in Sweden (which probably would’ve been owned by somebody else anyway).
So the combination of Paul and Swanson is not that uncommon in this Christian immigrant nation. There are several Pauls Swanson in every city, including at least one patent attorney in Seattle (where I live), who even shares my middle initial. One Paul wrote a book on Microcomputer Disk Techniques, which was a little beyond my nascent programming skills at the time. Not one of the Pauls is famous enough to warrant a Wikipedia entry, however.
As an adult, I woke up and renounced the faiths I took from my parents. Recently, some current political events have made me increasingly frustrated with Christianity, but I gradually realized that my loathing is not for the rank and file of modern-day Christian-Americans, who are by and large good people, but for Christian evangelism and rigid dogma. The emotionally manipulative, brutally persistent hawking of spiritual wares and restricted thought, initiated by that first Christian, Saint Paul of Tarsus. St. Paul, though he may have meant well, created a monster that afflicts the world even today.
So I changed my name, ‘back’ to Saul, in a small effort to undo some part of the two thousand years of Christian hegemony instigated by St. Paul. I have not converted to Judaism, nor to anti-Christianity, nor even to any religion that has a name. I have adopted a set of superstitions unique to me, and I promise not to start any wars with the inevitable faithless nation.
One of my superstitions involves the Law of Conservation of Letters, which of course would apply to name changes. Luckily my last name had an S to spare; a slight prestidigitation and my correct name became Saul Pwanson. A fine name, even if it is a little irregular; and I was happy to find that the domain name was still available.
signature experiments
March 22nd, 2005 Filed Under personal
In response to an article on slashdot, I registered and commented thusly:
Two years ago, I began signing documents with a simple graphic that my friends call “the booby lady”, a line drawing of a naked (and extremely busty) female form, nipples included. Since then, I’ve co-signed a bank loan, signed a lease, gotten a new driver’s license, and signed innumerable credit card statements and other documents. I’ve only had about a dozen experiences over these past two years when the signature-requester even noticed that my signature is odd (nevermind that I always sign documents sideways), and only a handful of these make any kind of verbal acknowledgement.
My new signature has only been challenged twice, and both were employers: the first (which was my employer during the signature change) apparently got a complaint from a female employee in human resources, noticed that my signature at hire was different from my current one, and told me to “print my name instead of using my signature” if I needed to sign anything for them in the future. The second (my current employer) simply wanted some official documentation that this was my legal signature before they hired me, so I went over to the DMV and got a new driver’s license with nothing more than a double-take from the employee that watched me sign the license.
So not only can you sign anything you like any way you like, as very few people (less than 5%) will even bother to check that it matches, but also, as far as I can tell, *no one* will prevent you from legally changing your signature to something completely nonverbal and nonsensical.
And my first slashdot remark was moderated +1!
Concerto pour piano et orchestre en sol majeur
March 15th, 2005 Filed Under personal
I finally took the time to research some of the history behind the Piano Concerto in G, my favorite piece of music I have yet had the great fortune to discover. I remember walking home in 1995 from the Station Theatre, listening to some cheap Naxos recording, and having a significant spiritual experience. I can still remember the exact measure in the second movement where I saw God, though better performances and recordings thrust me into the same transcendent bliss earlier and for much longer.
I’ve been reticent over the past 10 years to relate my experience, and no one but me knows which bar of that Naxos recording awakened me to the beauty of this piece. Today, I learned that this Concerto was one of Ravel’s last pieces, while he was already suffering mental and physical decline, after a lifetime (he was 58) of critically acclaimed work. Marguerite Long, the first performer of the piano part of this piece, apparently recalls in her memoirs:
“It is a difficult work especially in respect of the second movement where one has no respite. I told Ravel one day how anxious I was, after all the fantasy and brilliant orchestration of the first part, to be able to maintain the cantabile of the melody of the piano alone during such a long slow flowing phrase… ‘That flowing phrase!’ Ravel cried. ‘How I worked over it bar by bar! It nearly killed me!’”
I don’t have strong enough words to appropriately thank whatever God might exist, for the Concerto pour piano et orchestre en sol majeur.
