BeeHappy BeeLog
Random rants, reviews and ongoing struggles for better customer service
Thu 2 Sep 2010
The Ultimate Frisbee season here in the IBM league has come to an end once again. This year, thanks in large part to our interns, we did much better than last year and made it into the playoffs and finished in the top 4 (we didn’t win).
The end-of-season banquet is today and these are the tickets:
It was pretty embarrassing when I burst out loud laughing after reading the terms and conditions on the back of the tickets. Check it our for yourself (if you’re reading this at work, you might want to warn your coworkers that loud laughter might follow shortly):
Posted by admin under C'est La Vie , Working Hard or Hardly Working?
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Tue 31 Aug 2010
It isn’t that I don’t like children or that I hate babies. I think they are cute and I like watching them with their parents, especially when they aren’t crying. But I usually don’t like holding other people’s babies, especially when I am unfamiliar with the baby. For some reason though, probably because I am a woman, people always assume that I do want to hold their babies and they already start handing them over while asking “would you like to hold him”? As if I have a choice by then.
I’m better once I get to know the baby (kind of like you have to get to know people before you feel comfortable handling them) especially if he or she is an easy going happy child that doesn’t cry over every single thing. The babies that seem to cry as soon as I come near them especially scare me.
Greg on the other hand is really good with babies. He always seems to know how to play with them and hold them and he really enjoys it. So I am always faced with an awkward moment when we go to visit someone with a new baby and they start handing it to me where I have to say “Oh… It’s ok… I think Greg wants to hold him”. It might just be my imagination but I always feel like they are thinking I’m a bad woman for not wanting to hold and fuss over every baby I see.
Notice the uncomfortable awkward smile as I am holding a new baby. In this case it wasn’t too bad because I know the parents very well and baby Daniel turned out to be a pretty calm baby. We warmed up to each other quickly.
Posted by admin under C'est La Vie
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Fri 27 Aug 2010
This is a great article by Guy Deutscher talking about whether the language we speak shapes the way we think. Having learned (and forgotten) a few languages by now I find the topic of languages fascinating. Not so much the linguistic and grammar part of it, but more its history, the connection of languages to the person and culture associated with it. Guy Deutscher also published a couple books which after reading this article I’m interested in getting.
This article discusses that speakers of different languages may in fact be conditioned by their languages to put emphasis on different things and therefore experience and perceive the world in different ways. Someone who speaks a language with a gender associated to inanimate objects (like French or Spanish) might personify these objects more than someone who speaks a language which does not (like English). The fact that the speaker is constantly needing to specify gender, whether for people or things, might make the person and the entire culture that speaks that language more aware of gender and sexuality than a culture that speaks a language where it is possible to have an entire conversation about someone without ever mentioning the person’s gender.
This got me thinking. It is a fairly popular stereotype that North American culture is more uptight than European or Latin American when it comes to sexuality and gender roles. Is it possible that the fact that you don’t always know the gender of the person discussed and you are constantly trying to find a tactful way of asking “is your friend a girl?” or “was this classmate a boy?” has actually made gender and sexuality a little more forbidden and exciting and therefore controversial (kind of like a woman showing her knees or ankles back in the day was considered sexy only because most of the time these body parts were hidden)? The author of the article does not delve into this, but I wouldn’t be surprised if language was, at least in part, responsible for making North Americans a little more sexually uptight than their Latin and European counterparts.
The article also mentions that although most people orient the world relative to themselves - by referring to things being on their left, right, in front or behind - there are some languages which do not have this concept and from a very young age children learn to use geographical locations to identify where they and the objects around them are. This is very interesting on its own, since people from these cultures have great orientation and directional skills. They don’t find themselves checking the position of the sun or stars or looking at their compass. Instead of being in the “center” of their own universe, they are instead aware at all times of their position in the objective universe. And I imagine as children they never have to hear “No, your other left!”
Posted by admin under And Now In Other News...
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Tue 24 Aug 2010
After the first couple days of enjoying Paris, we flew to Biarritz in the French Basque country. We spent 4 great days there, walking around the streets of little towns and around the city of Biarritz. The weather wasn’t so great, but we did manage to get a whole day or warm sun on a beach, located in the center of the city.
Basque country, I was told, is like France’s Quebec. The region has its own language and culture, and keeps trying to separate.
We stayed in a hotel in the outskirts of a town called Saint Jean de Luz, located only about 15 minutes from Spain! Its a really pretty resort-y town, with cute houses with red clay roofs and red and green window shutters. It’s on the ocean, so you can walk down the beach and its full of cafes, restaurants and bars.
The food was my favourite part of the trip. Never have we had so much fish and ham in the span of 4 days as we did in the Basque country. They have a prosciutto-style smoked ham there (actually from the Spain side) called Serrano, which I really liked (despite my very picky relationship with pork products). The majority of the time, we would have some variation of the smoked meat and baguette and sangria for lunch and then seafood for dinner.
Of course every dinner was accompanied by wine. We also learned all about “Apero” - short for Aperitif - which is a pre-dinner drink you have somewhere else, usually accompanied by some snack or light appetizer. The popular and fashionable choice currently in France is Rose wine, but in Basque Sangria is also very big. So most evenings we had some of both accompanied by Tapas - usually in the form of little sandwiches and more smoked meats. We usually didn’t make it out to dinner before about 9:30, which I am told is normal dinner time in France. We also had Foie Gras twice while we were there, once it was big pieces of it just on baguettes, so you could really taste how good it was. The food overall wasn’t particularly cheap, but I liked how affordable the things we usually consider to be pricey were, like the foie gras and good French wine. We drank a LOT of wine in the past week…
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Wed 11 Aug 2010
We had a really nice time in Paris today. We walked around the Louvre
(outside) and around Paris. The line up to get into the Louvre was at least an hour long, probably longer and aparently there are line-ups inside the Louvre to actually see the famous paintings like the Mona Lisa. So we didn’t want to spend a couple hours of our 3+ days in Paris standing in line.
Instead we drank coffee and ate snacks in little
cafes (like La Duree) and went to a very French (and good) restaurant for dinner. Greg is trying to practice his French, and he’s doing pretty well. The only problem is when he speaks French, they start speaking French back and usually both of us get lost and have to ask them to switch to English. So far no one has been rude to us 
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Wed 4 Aug 2010
The Word Detective answered my question! Here it is:
The Word Detective
By Evan Morris
Dear Word Detective: I am now on my fourth Dan Brown book, and if there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that he likes to make up legit-sounding stories about lost origins of words and customs that have lost their intended meaning. That makes him a good story teller but not a very reliable source of information. In his latest book, The Lost Symbol, he talks about how the word “atonement” is actually “at-one-ment,” an ancient religious ideal of becoming one with God and the universe (I’m paraphrasing of course). Is there any truth to this tale of the origin of “atonement”? — Diana.
Fourth Dan Brown book? Awesome. I must admit that I’ve never read a Dan Brown book. I did try to watch a movie made from one of them on TV, but I am violently allergic to Tom Hanks and had to stop. Tom Hanks reminds me of my 7th grade science teacher so strongly that I start to smell formaldehyde when he appears on the screen. In any case, I found the part of the movie I did see implausible, because I have a cousin by marriage who is in the Knights Templar and he does nothing but watch football and play with his ferret.
I have, however, read a fair bit about Dan Brown books, specifically his somewhat idiosyncratic uses of the English language, about which grammarian Geoffrey Pullum at Language Log has had much to say. Then there’s the wee fact that referring to Leonardo da Vinci (literally “Leonardo of Vinci,” Vinci being his birthplace in Italy) as “da Vinci” in the title “The Da Vinci Code” is like referring to Jesus of Nazareth as “of Nazareth.”
But now onward to page 58 of The Lost Symbol, where a dude named Peter is attempting to convince his sister Katherine (who seems to sigh a lot) that most of the 20th century advances in theoretical physics were actually well known to the Ancients. (Too bad the Ancients didn’t take time out to notice penicillin, a comparatively mundane discovery that might have allowed more of them to live past age thirty, but I digress.) Thus, according to Peter, “entanglement theory” (a.k.a. quantum entanglement) in particle physics was “at the core of primeval beliefs,” reflected in the Ancients’ striving for “at-one-ment,” the state being “at one” with the universe. Pete goes on to explain that this “at-one-ment” is the root of our modern English word “atonement.”
It pains me a bit to say this, because I have no doubt that Dan Brown’s vast catalog of historical nonsense has included many etymological fables, but in this case he is essentially correct about the roots of “atonement.” The verb “to atone,” on which “atonement” is based, meaning “to reconcile, appease, unite,” is a contraction of the phrase “at one,” in which the “one” retains the pronunciation it had in the 16th century (which is probably why the word’s roots are not more obvious). As to the extent the Ancients may plausibly have played a role in this formation, “atone” in English appears to have been modeled on the Latin verb “adunare,” meaning “to unite,” a combination of “ad” (to, at) and “unum” (one).
The idea of everyone getting along is hardly recent, of course, and before “atone” appeared in the 16th century the adverbial phrase “at one” was commonly used in English to mean “in harmony” or “at peace.” But behind the scenes of “atone” (and the verbal noun “atonement,” which also appeared during the 16th century) is the sense of a dispute being settled, usually by the offender expiating a crime through some act of contrition or reparation. In modern usage we “atone for” a wrong that we have done; we do not simply “atone with” other people, joining hands and humming at the sky. That “making up for a wrong done” connotation sets “atonement” quite a ways apart from the gauzy “We are the universe” sentiment Brown ascribes to the Ancients.
Copyright © 2010 by Evan Morris
For Release: Friday, July 23, 2010
Posted by admin under Writing What Deserves to Be Read
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Mon 26 Jul 2010
I am once more playing Frisbee with my co-workers in the IBM league. We are doing much better than last year, winning about half of our games. Thanks to our interns we have a huge team - if everyone showed up we’d have enough people for 3 lines! Most of the time though we have just under 2 lines of players, so even though our team is twice as big as last year, the number of people playing each week is about the same.
This year we gained quite a few good players. Our interns are all very athletic guys who also have good sportsmanship. Having a huge team is a big benefit because what we don’t have in quality we make up in quantity. Usually our second half goes much better than the first and by that time the other team is tired while we just got warmed up. We even have cool new jerseys that have our team name on them (Disc-Hovery)
Just like last year, I am definitely not one of the strong players on the field but since we usually only have 4-5 girls in each game (despite having 8 girls actually signed up on the team) I feel needed, which is nice. I do feel that I’ve gotten better than last year, so maybe in another season or two (or 20) I’ll actually be considered “good”. Until then, I will do my best.
Posted by admin under C'est La Vie , Working Hard or Hardly Working?
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Thu 22 Jul 2010
I have a couple co-workers who are from former Soviet Russia. They are quite a bit older than me (maybe 15-20 years) and so they would’ve been growing up in the USSR and presumably having the same kinds of experiences that my parents and their friends and so many others I come in contact with.
However, whenever the topic of communism or USSR or anything like that comes up they seem to pretend to not know what I’m talking about. Either that or they’ve blocked it out of their minds… I’m not saying that everyone there had the exact same experience - although the USSR did operate of compliance and getting rid of people’s individuality, there’s even a term for it, it’s called Russification - I would at least expect them to not play dumb since they would’ve at least heard of these things. There is even a pretty famous comedy in Russia which makes fun of the fact that everything there is pretty much the same no matter where you are or who you are. In the movie a guy, after getting super drunk on New Years Eve accidentally flies to the wrong city, but when he gets there he still manages to find the same street where he lives and the same building on this street with the same apartment and his key even opened the apartment door. The apartment turns out to be someone else’s.
My point is, that some experiences in the former USSR were the same whether you grew up in Moscow, Minsk or Kiev. Things like The Young Pioneer summer camps, the way everything in school revolved around Lenin, the fact that there was a lot of propaganda and misrepresentation in the Soviet History books, student-Olympics and how much significance they held, the crazy elections with only one candidate, working on farms harvesting potatoes on your summers off from university… and so on.
Now that they live here, they should be recalling these memories with the fondness of youthful blissful ignorance to how ridiculous some of these things were. Instead, when I mentioned today that my parents as kids went to a “Russian propaganda summer camp” they acted like they didn’t know what I was talking about. I asked them what they did in the summers and they responded “I don’t know, played with my friends”. Fine, maybe you didn’t go to the Pioneer camps, but there’s no way, growing up there, you wouldn’t know that they existed.
Or the other day we were talking about traveling to Prague and I was telling the story about how our tour guide (in English) was badmouthing Russia and Russians the whole time she was giving the tour, because the Czech people blame being occupied by USSR for a lot of their problems till this day. I even have a distant relative who was in the army at that time and personally drove a Soviet tank into Czechoslovakia. One of those two coworkers, who’s originally from Ukraine, looked at me half puzzled being like “Russia invaded Czechoslovakia? You’re always trying to make it seem like USSR was invading everyone” to which I responded “I’m not making it seem that way, they were invading everyone!”.
I don’t know if he just drank too much of the communist Kool-aid and is still misinformed or maybe it is just an act but I find it hard to believe that all the experiences I’ve heard about from so many friends and relatives and my own parents are just made up stories.
Posted by admin under C'est La Vie , Working Hard or Hardly Working?
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Tue 13 Jul 2010
The new Old Spice commercials have become a huge hit, and clearly Old Spice is using everything in their power to engage the new fans further on the internet. The Old Spice guy has a few youtube videos where he responds to fans’ comments on Facebook and Twitter. Here are my two favourites:
Posted by admin under All the world's a stage
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Fri 18 Jun 2010
After Frisbee last night (our third win this season so far, oh yeah) we went to Boston Pizza as usual to celebrate our win.
Imagine our shock when a police officer, in full uniform came up to our table with a pitcher of pop and said “Did you guys order the Pepsi?”
We didn’t know what to think. The first thought that came to everone’s mind when we saw him walking towards us was that something happened. When he served us the pop, we naturally we started asking questions.
As it turned out, the York Region Police department was waiting tables in Boston Pizza for the night for Charity. They were volunteering to raise money for the Special Olympics. Our “waiter”, carrying a tray full of waters, seemed very unsure of himself as a server. He admitted that he likes his policing work much more and that waiting tables is just not his calling. He especially struggled with taking orders. Nonetheless, despite his insecurities in his new position, he did very well. He was polite and courteous and was probably nicer than half the waiters out there. Good job York Region Police! I hope they raised lots of cash.
Posted by admin under And Now In Other News... , C'est La Vie
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