Chris dug this up for me when he was moving out.

I pseudo-finished a job today. Until today, I went in seven days a week. After today, I will go once a week. I really liked the job, but I had cut back because of school commitments, so I made a deal with my boss.

The best part of work today was showing my boss what a USB drive was and how easy it was to use and how cheap it was to buy. My boss was almost giddy to learn about this technology. Before today, he had been burning files onto CDs.

I have had some really good jobs in my life. To have really good jobs in your 20s, you would normally need to be an ambitious, high-performing kind of person, or to be a computer programmer. I am not really either of those, but I have had good jobs, mostly by being in the right place at the right time.

I think the best way to succeed in the workplace is to be someone who plans ahead and who uses checklists to make sure they don't miss things. This is much easier said than done.

I wonder if people in their 20s and 30s build the habit of just memorizing things and being a smart expert, and then in their 40s and 50s their memories get a bit slower and they have to write more things down. Probably the best thing I can do in my 20s is to write down the things I need to get done and not just assume I will remember them.

Chris claims I can use any pasta sauce, that they are all good all last forever. There are a few jars left in our house since he moved out, but I know some of the pasta sauce is pretty old and I can't figure which jars are which. I may need to throw out the pasta sauce and start again.

Report on Editing Ottawa Hybrid (2014)

When I count things up, 2014 Ottawa Hybrid was supposed to have 779 good questions -- 21 tossups and 20 bonuses per round, and 19 rounds written. When I count my own output (writing and editing), I think I tally 115 questions. I think I wrote good stuff, but even if I did, this comes in at under 15% of the tournament. I spent a lot of time and stress on the questions, but I fell way short of the 25% (195 questions) that a senior editor should have worked on.

I've now edited for three Ottawa Hybrid Tournaments, and I think all three of them were released "incomplete" -- this is, the edit crew didn't have everything done by the deadline, so we had to just shrug and print the tournament with whatever we had.


Explanation of Quizbowl Because My Parents Will See This Post

Quizbowl is a cool game where people with buzzers answer questions and score points. Quizbowl has probably been my "main hobby" for the last five or six years. One thing about quizbowl is that almost every tournament is played on original questions -- this is, every time there's a tournament, it means someone out there wrote a day's worth of quiz questions.

I wrote and edited questions for a quizbowl tournament called 2014 Ottawa Hybrid, "hybrid" because the questions are half about academic stuff and half about pop culture. The edit crew was me and five or six other people. Ottawa Hybrid was a "packet submission" tournament, meaning that all the competing teams sent some questions to the editors, and the bulk of the competition was played on our revised versions of what the teams sent us.

A "tossup" is a 6- or 7-line question designed to stump people at the beginning and then gradually become more obvious -- this is so experts could buzz in at the start, but many players could buzz in if it gets to the end. A "bonus" is a set of three short questions on the same topic.

What I Wrote for the Tournament

I worked on 102 tossups and 13 bonuses. I made a point of prioritizing the tossups, because I was a senior editor, and because I generally think good tossups are more difficult to make than good bonuses.

I wrote and edited a lot of questions about literature, art, pop music, and TV. I wrote a handful of questions in other subjects.

Top Songs of 2013

1. Lorde -- "Tennis Court"
2. Autre Ne Veut -- "Play By Play"
3. Jason Isbell -- "The Elephant"
4. Valley Lodge -- "Go"
5. Tegan and Sara -- "Closer"
6. Young Galaxy -- "Fall For You"
7. Rhye -- "Open"
8. Kurt Vile -- "Wakin On a Pretty Day"
9. The 1975 -- "Sex"
10. The Front Bottoms -- "Au Revoir"

Top ten songs from other years: 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008.