GC, I'm right down the coast, send to me! (See MM, if you got that transporter thing working, then YOU could have the sandwich... so there!)

OMG - GREAT phone call. The guy definiately wants to work with me but he doesn't have an open position at the moment. BUT the position he is working on creating sounds perfect for me and is a great mix of the skills I already have and the challenges of working on his team. I talked about how I would like to wait until June before any major moves and he said that timing actually worked well with his plans.

I need to send him my resume - which I need to beef up with internal stuff. Right now my resume is more fit for outside companies. I need to add internal training and other lingo that only makes sense to someone who works here.

OMG. So, nothing absolute, but yet a big potential. AND he said the he has had others within the company call him and encourage him to bring me into his group. Accckkkk.

Sorry for preempting the religious commentary. I might have comments, but I have no brain.

Wasn't Nilly working on that?

Yes. Computer simulation of.

tommyrot, I saw a really cool thing on the Discovery channel once about how it's not even idiots, it's essentially related to fluid dynamics, but I suspect idiots factor in there anyway.

Yeah, I've read the fluid dynamics thing. In this case they've apparently shown that a driver who overreacts and brakes too much for a situation can cause a "wave" of drivers slowing behind him. The wave actually moves backwards relative to traffic.

eta: From the article:

The team developed a mathematical model to show the impact of unexpected events such as a lorry pulling out of its lane on a dual carriageway. Their model revealed that slowing down below a critical speed when reacting to such an event, a driver would force the car behind to slow down further and the next car back to reduce its speed further still. The result of this is that several miles back, cars would finally grind to a halt, with drivers oblivious to the reason for their delay. The model predicts that this is a very typical scenario on a busy highway (above 15 vehicles per km). The jam moves backwards through the traffic creating a so-called ‘backward travelling wave’, which drivers may encounter many miles upstream, several minutes after it was triggered.

Frankly, I think it's all because they use lorries and carriageways....

OMG - GREAT phone call

W00t!

The guys and his 3 kids that were lost getting a Christmas tree were found alive and stuff.

YAY for good phone calls!

I haven't had a chance to read in here for a few days--Sean, I'm sorry they have been so rough for you and S. Let me know if there is anything I can do this weekend, if you are still here.

Yay Suzi!

Anyone up for a little resume review???

I can't prove there's a God, and the kind of Christianity I was raised to believe just doesn't hold up under my own scrutiny anymore...but I want to believe, and there's still plenty out there that convinces me that there very well might be a God. So I'm sort of an agnostic Christian. Or, as I sometimes explain it, I have the faith of puddleglum --I try to live as like a Narnian as I can even if there is no Narnia, and I'm on Aslan's side even if there is no Aslan to lead it.

The way this was expressed by Lewis originally did give me a great many problems, though I understand you don't mean it exactly the way he did.

In the "Silver Chair", the Witch was trying to hypnotize Eustace and the rest into believing that there was no such thing as the sun, that it was a made up idealization of the gas lamp, and no such thing as a Lion, it was based on the an idealization of housecats, and that the whole surface was a fairy tale based on the underground they were trapped in and so forth.

And the point of that metaphor of how impoverished the view of the world is without God and Heavan. A world without Christ is to a world with Christ as a sputtering gas lamp is to the sun. A world without God is to a world with god as a dingy cave is to a green paradise, as a housecat is to a Lion.

And of course it is making an emotional argument without even seeing the countervailing emotional argument. That to someone who appreciates the wonder of universe this lovely that happened as a result of a confluence of natural laws, it is adding a great puppeteer, that seems empty and hollow. If the Tyger and the Lamb came about as the result of natural laws and a great deal of luck, that is more, not less, wonderful that if there was a great clock maker sticking gears and winding them up.

And what I'm angry and Lewis for is not that he expressed his own emotional truth here, but that he never saw that an atheist can have an opposite emotional truth just as joyous and rich.

That you don't need to be on "Aslan's side" , to be on the side of --- well to be simple minded -- good, that in fact good is still good even if you don't drop one "O".

I'm willing to understand that for Lewis, without Christ and God , and heaven, life would have been as empty as dreary as his metaphor; but there is just such a contempt in Lewis for any possibility of the opposite emotional truth -- not only in Narnia but in any of his writing. He could barely understand atheism as a great sorry, as a sad truth people reluctantly faced (not that he thought it true); he could never understand that it could be emotionally a joyful thing, a liberation, an expansion rather than contraction of the universe.

That's great news, Suzi!

I haven't read The Silver Chair yet (I'm getting through the Narnia books pretty slowly, and that's the next one up), but now I'm really interested to read it. (I was rolling my eyes at the end of Voyage of the Dawn Treader where Aslan said something like, "Of course I exist in your world. It was just better for you to meet me here first, where you could get to know me in this form, before you got older and went back to your world and got to know me there." I expect subtext to be slightly more sub than than.)