Just because I'm back at the same Extruded Office Product place as last year doesn't mean nothing's changed. For a while I was again tucked into the same office with the projects I was nominally working on suspended due to circumstances beyond my control and thus spending my time napping or reading or hanging around on Usenet and sometimes looking out the window at the traffic. But we pretty swiftly got into some big changes.
The first is that the computer I had last time around now has speakers, so that I can listen to Internet radio. This is really wonderful because since leaving Singapore I haven't been listening to enough old-time radio and I'm glad to get back in touch with the comedy hits of 1939.
Also they moved me from my old office into another one that another guy's been using for five years. To fit me in this new spot, they had to relocate him to another and empty office. I'm still not clear on the purpose of all this, although it got him a bigger office, which he hadn't been asking for. I think my new office is about the same size, although it's got wood paneling on one wall instead of chipped white paint so it looks darker, and I haven't got as good a view out the window. I have a window, and now it's right in front instead of right behind me, but it looks out mostly onto the sky and side of the building, which is less interesting and will make it harder to tell when it starts snowing.
The odd twist --- why do you assume there's an odd twist? --- is that the guy moved out of my new office had the same name as me and people had a need to call him for reasons other than moving his car to let other people out. So I'm getting a lot of calls from people who seem to want to talk to me, but in fact don't. I'm getting apologized to a lot more these days.
Trivia: The earliest known article about baseball in an academic or technical journal was Harvard University's Frederick Mosteller's analysis of the World Series in the Journal of the American Statistical Association in 1952. He studied whether a best-of-seven series was adequate to determine which team was better. He demonstrated it was unreliable, in twenty-five pages. Source: The Numbers Game: Baseball's Lifelong Fascination With Statistics, Alan Schwarz.
Currently Reading: Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee: An Indian History of the American West, Dee Brown.