Eight Random Things About Me

1. Each player starts with eight random facts/habits about themselves.
2. People who are tagged need to write a post on their own blog (about their eight things) and post these rules.
3. At the end of your blog, you need to choose eight people to get tagged and list their names.
4. Don’t forget to leave them a comment telling them they’re tagged, and to read your blog.

Eight Random Facts About Moriash Moreau

1. I still have my First Land.
It's expanded quite a bit (currently something just under a quarter sim), but that parcel remains at the center. Remember First Land, back before it was abused to the point that LL dropped the whole program?

Way, way back in early January, 2005, I bought my first 512 in a newly-minted sim called Louise. Soon thereafter, I persuaded a RL friend by the SL name of Howel Pinkerton to buy an adjacent plot, so that we could group together and pool our resources. Being the SL veteran (having been in SL for a week and a half), it fell to me to register the group. I wanted a name that was pithy, and included both of our SL pseudonyms, Howel and Moriash. After a little (very little, evidently) thought, I stumbled across what I thought to be the perfect group name. I dropped my L$100 to register the group, and called up Howel on the phone to tell him to log in and join up. That's how, for the five minutes until I actually said it aloud, "Ho-Mo Industries" came to be. And how, five minutes and one second later, "Pinkerton-Moreau Industries" took its place.

I first found this out during the last semester of my last year of college, back in 1996. I was part of a four man team intended to design and build a prototype prosthetic hand. (Quite an ambitious project for a two semester design course, now that I look back on it.) As things fell out, I was tasked with designing and building the thumb assembly, a complex two-degree-of-freedom device allowing the thumb to both pinch open and closed, and rotate from parallel to perpendicular to the palm. (It was pretty cutting-edge at the time, and was probably the last real mechanical engineering I ever did. Don't be fooled by its apparent simplicity here. Much of the mechanism is concealed inside the wrist.) I also ended up doing much of the machining for the finger assemblies, as well. (I'm particularly proud of the buff-finished clear Lexan fingers and thumb, a build process I designed on the fly one week.) So, the upshot of of all this was I ended up spending about 25-30 hours a week, all semester long in the machine shop, breaking only long enough to go to classes and eat a sandwich from time to time. (I would have done the latter at the shop, too, but I found that aluminum shavings ruin the taste of bologna and Kraft singles.) I became a daily fixture in the shop, even to the point that the master machinist in charge swung by early to let me in each day, just so I could get in another hour at the mill or lathe each day while he took care of his normal morning business elsewhere.

Now what, you ask, does all this have to do with penicillin? Well, at one point in the latter half of the semester, I ended up getting mildly sick. I think it was some kind of sinus infection, can't remember for sure. In any case, I went to the doctor and was prescribed a cycle of some kind of penicillin derivative. Things went along fine for a couple days, until I woke up one morning with a case of head-to-toe hives. Needless to say, I was a little alarmed by this turn of events, so I dashed off to the doctor. It was at this point that I was diagnosed with the allergy, and given a cortisone shot (with what I remember being the largest needle I've ever seen in my life) before being sent on my way. Once that was taken care of, I broke multiple traffic laws (and perhaps a couple laws of physics) to get back up to the machine shop.

I ended up arriving about an hour later than usual. The machinist was irritated at having come in early to let me in, only to find that I didn't show up. I apologized profusely, telling him that I had an emergency doctor's visit, but I got there as soon as I could. By way of explanation, I rolled up my sleeves. (Long sleeves were normally a no-no in the shop, for obvious reasons, but I had to make a concession to concealing my temporary disfigurement.) Then I motioned to my arms and face to show him the itchy, full-body rash that blotched my skin. He took an involuntary half-step back (I assured him it wasn't contagious), and immediately subsided. Then I went to work with my old friend, the Bridgeport milling machine. (Ah, how I miss that thing!) In a few days, all signs of the rash had faded. And, as an added bonus, I got considerable uninterrupted time on the equipment for the next couple of weeks after. Evidently, nobody wanted to get close enough to the guy with the weird, possibly contagious skin condition to ask him to knock off and give them a turn.

I suppose I should make this tale even longer, and give a little more back story. Each week I had to turn in a progress report to my faculty advisor on the project. He and I had never gotten along, and frequently got into long, rigidly polite arguments about design issues. These were mainly about him wanting to change the design a different way each week, sometimes in useful ways, sometimes not. I naturally wanted to stick with the plans I'd spent the entire previous semester developing, and had already half-built, so was resistant to his suggestions. (That, and I was brash, over-confident little putz, a malady all too common to college students worldwide.) By mid-semester, our relationship had gotten to the point of me showing up to drop off my progress report, and him snatching it out of my hands and growling "you can go." Worse, I'd taken, and failed, an advanced robotics elective course from him the year before, so he was already predisposed to think of me as an inept slacker. It was a foregone conclusion that my grade for this class wasn't going to be stellar, whether I succeeded in finishing a working prosthetic or not. This was going to be a real problem, because my GPA from previous semesters wasn't all that great. Rice University required a rigid minimum of a 2.0 GPA to graduate, no rounding, no exceptions. If I didn't do exceptionally well that last semester, I was going to fall short. And, since my faculty advisor couldn't stand the sight of me, and also happened to be the mechanical engineering department chairman, there wasn't going to be any recourse or chance for appeal.

Finally, the end of the semester rolled around and, after one final all-nighter, we presented a fully functional prosthetic hand, complete with rather nifty (if I do say so myself) two-degree-of-freedom thumb. We were invited to a mechanical engineering department mixer immediately after, where to my surprise I was warmly greeted by my advisor. He shook my hand, clapped me on my shoulder, and congratulated me. He told me how he was, frankly, suspicious of the number of hours on my progress reports, and went to talk to the master machinist about them. The machinist gave a glowing report, capped with the story of the time I showed up "looking like a leper" (his words), and still eager to get to work.

Evidently, this was enough to convince my faculty advisor that I was no longer the slacker he remembered. He informed me that I would be receiving a perfect score for the course, because we had succeeded in finishing the project successfully (we were the first design group in eight years to do so), but more because of my "remarkable endurance" (his words) in doing so. I thanked him, grinning like an idiot. We chatted a bit more about this and that, all the sudden the best of buddies, then went our separate ways.

Well, a few days later, I walked the stage and received my diploma. A couple days after that, I went in to pick up a copy of my final transcripts. Final grade point average: 2.0. Passed, by the skin of my teeth, on the strength of that final A+ grade.

Thus, at the end of it all, I owe my degree and my current career to that design project, and the massive amount of work required to bring it to fruition. And, in some small part, to that penicillin allergy.

Otherwise, the accidents involved various variations of cars rear-ending me. Nothing terribly interesting, otherwise. Aside from a passenger's skinned knee in one case, and a minor whiplash injury (mine) in another, there were no injuries. Three of the seven cars I've owned were totaled in such accidents, although all three of them were scratch-the-paint-and-it's-totaled variety hoopties. I suppose you could say I've been simultaneously very lucky and very unlucky in my driving experience.

Every time we traveled or I was left at a baby sitter, we had to take my CoCo along. This involved packing the CoCo itself, the color TV it plugged into, the tape drive, the external 5.25" disc drive (that was fancy tech back then), the joysticks, the game cartridges, the tapes, and all the cables into a large steamer trunk and dragging along with me. As far as I know, it's still packed in that trunk in my parents' attic.

I've tried teas of all sorts (red, white, black, green, chai, blends, etc. etc. etc.), prepared both by myself and by tea aficionados (just to make sure it's done correctly). I've followed the instructions of acknowledged experts in the field of tea preparation, and have tried adding all the accepted additives, including milk, sugar, honey, and lemon. Invariably, no matter the type or how it's prepared, it tastes like muddy water. Or, sometimes, muddy water accented with milk, sugar, or lemon. I just completely miss the appeal.

And please, oh please, don't leave me comments telling me how to make it properly, or what tea to try. (That goes for coffee or alcohol, too.) Believe me when I say I have had properly prepared tea, in as many varieties as are reasonably available to me. It's not the prep. It's the tea. And, well, me. Clearly there's something wrong with my makeup (not that I'm overly concerned about this). Same with coffee. I've tried many types, often prepared by coffee enthusiasts and professional barristas, and I will never understand how something that smells so wonderful can taste so unbelievably foul.

I occasionally become obsessed by this problem, and go another disappointing round with one chosen beverage or another. I'll try a new type of tea, or buy (nay, invest) in a fancy tall Starbucks something-or-other (okay, frappacinos are good, but those are hardly "adult beverages"), or crack open a bottle of beer recommended by beer-snob friends as good introductory brews. I've tried many a mixed drink whose primary selling point seems to be that it disguises the alcohol. These uniformly seem to be both tasting of Windex and foul in their own right.

But I keep trying, for two reasons. First, so many people seem to enjoy them. Okay, someone out there seems to enjoy every possible human experience. But I mean sane, normal people. I feel like I'm missing out on a fundamental simple pleasure of civilized human existence. I envy that sense of calm and serenity that comes with that morning cup of coffee or tea. (It's possible that I've seen too many Folger's commercials.) A part of me longs for the easy camaraderie that comes with knocking back a cold brew with friends. And that brings me to the second reason. It's remarkably awkward to be the only non-stimulated tea-totaler (or I guess non-tea-totaler) in the room. And now that I've given up drinking Coca-Cola for diet reasons, it's even worse. (Diet Coke, along with most diet soft drinks, tastes like motor oil. And yes, I do know what motor oil tastes like. Don't ask.) "What would you like to drink?" "Uh, water, I guess." "You sure you wouldn't like coffee? Or tea? Or coffee? We have 47 types of beer! And Coke!" "Just water, please." "Oh. Okay. Sure." There's no way to casually ask for a glass of water in a social setting without looking like a stick in the mud. At restaurants, they just assume I'm cheap, and I can live with that. The only thing I've found helps at other social engagements is to get far more enthusiastic about simple H2O than any sane person would ever be. "I'd love a big ol' glass of nice cold ice water. Golly, that'd really hit the spot right now! Mmm-MMM! Gimme some of that fine, fine tap water! My mouth is watering! Heh, heh, heh." There are, of course, problems with that approach, as well.