Zeta's Stories: High School

Father Benedict

So when I was in high school, we had this awesome priest by the name of Father Benedict. He was a science teacher, and taught among other things biology (evolution, not that 6000 year old nonsense). He was an interesting fellow. Quick with a joke, kind, and unmistakable, because during class, his pet hedgehog would commonly end up sleeping in the hood of his habit! In addition to this, he wore paratrooper jump boots, which apparently have special sloped soles so that they don't catch on the airplane hatch and snap your neck when you're jumping out of the plane. I don't know what happened to him in the end, but he was quite a gamer and ended up the hub of the local file-sharing circle at the school. I should reach out and find out what happened to him some day.

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Mrs. Fletcher

Mrs. Fletcher was a grumpy old Nun who I had the misfortune of having as my teacher for Catholic Morality class. She basically turned it into "Why Abortion Is Bad 101", which had me wondering why on earth I should care since it wasn't my body in the first place. (I hadn't realized I was trans at the time, and even now I can't exactly bear a child.)

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Biology Teacher

I don't even remember her name, but she came in to teach a semester of sophomore biology after the normal teacher went on maternity leave. She came in with overheads... hand-written overheads that she proceeded to draw over to try and make more legible, which... did not work. Not my favorite teacher by a long shot, and given I all but passed out during a dissection, that was not my favorite class either. I cannot handle gooey sticky biology bits, and even the smell of formaldehyde makes me nauseous.

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Mr. T(aska)

Mr. T, as we called him, was a fantastic physics teacher and had all kinds of bling his loving students had given him over the years. He was very white, but went along with it, and was often quite funny. Among other things, I'll never forget his exhortation the first week of lab work, when he said something to the effect of "I know you are all very smart people, and they you can break anything you set your mind to. Please do not (intentionally) break anything in my lab!" :D

Mr. T also went on to push me to attend Fermi Lab's Saturday Morning Physics, which is a series of 9 three-hour Saturdays at Fermilab. You get two hours of lecture followed by a one hour tour of a different part of the facility. As a result, I've actually been /inside/ portions of that facility you can't even normally access, as the accelerator wasn't running while I was there.

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Dr. LeCompte

Oh boy, this guy. Nerd that I was, I was a member of Math Team, Science Olympiad, and Computer Club (and ended up running the latter two my senior year). Dr. LeCompte, though, was special. The guy didn't even work for the school. He just came in and taught probability and statistics for Math team when he wasn't flying over to Europe for what I later learned was involvement in CERN. He actually runs the bloody ATLAS detector over there, which I guess explains why his card counting problems were so fucking difficult! I learned probability from a /particle physicist!/

Zeta's Stories: Backups are Important!

So a few years ago I had a small NAS, serving as my main filesystem for all sorts of video and audio contents, packages, etc... It contained a lot of personal photos, etc, that I really would have hated to lose, and so I always kept a backup... of at least some of it. I couldn't quite afford a large enough backup unit at the time, so there were some things that only existed there.

One day, I came home from work and my NAS was off. "That's odd," I thought, since it ran 24/7, and I proceeded to try the power button. Absolutely nothing. Not an LED or anything else at all. Well, this NAS had a slightly odd internal power supply that ran off an external 19V brick, so I decided that I'd worry about the rest of the system later and just pop the drives out of the front and hook them up to my media center PC to try and check if my data was at least intact.

Montage ensues, pulling the media PC apart and placing the drives (still in their hot-swap trays) upside-down on top of the media PC. I hook everything up, plug the PC back in, and hit the power button. INSTANTLY, A THREE INCH FLAME shoots out of the top of one of the drive's controller boards where the hot-swap tray had shorted to the drive! Apparently, over time, the metal bottom of the tray had bent and made contact, and while the dinky little 120W NAS PSU tripped out and saved anything bad from happening, the old 750W PSU in the media PC was happy to just power the fuck through that short. Needless to say, that drive was toast, but my data survived to live another day thanks to RAID5, and now I keep backups all over the place.

Notes on easy off-site backups:
1. Encrypted flash or hard drive in your car's glove box.
2. Encrypted flash or hard drive in your bank safety deposit box. (Two or three 3.5" drives fit perfectly in a 3x5 box, which runs about $100/year most everywhere.)

Obviously, you'll have to rotate them periodically, but that's a good start at least!

Zeta's Stories: The Wicked Grounds Name Story

The first time I ever visited Wicked Grounds (a BDSM themed coffee shop in San Francisco), I was going to a small writers' meet with a friend of mine. He ended up being delayed by some personal stuff, so I ended up getting there a couple hours before he did. This was the first time I ever went as myself (female-presenting) to /anything/, and so I was a bit nervous. I hadn't changed my name yet, had just barely started therapy, and was very, very nervous.

Eventually, I went up to get a refill on my drank-far-too-quickly mocha, and the barista happened to ask me if I wanted to open a tab, since I looked like I'd be there a while. (I had my laptop, etc...) I said sure, and handed over my card, just as she was asking my name. Thinking she was doing a quick check on the card, I reacted instinctively with, "My name is <deadname>." She looked at me, sadness in her eyes, and said, "No hon. What's /your/ name?"

Zeta's Stories: Link Page

Here's a list of my personal stories, along with relevant tags:

• My Friend Lon (silly antics, highly amusing)
• The Wicked Grounds Name Story (heartfelt, gender)
• My Greatest Travel Disaster Story (quite hilarious, yakkety saks should be playing as you read this)
• Backups are Important! (title says it all for this one!)
• How To Make SPI Cry (embedded hardware, microcontrollers)
• Internship + Massive Flood (FPGAs, terrible software, epic flood)
• Home SWAT Team (police, somewhat terrifying with an ambiguous ending)
• Work SWAT Team (police, no one seriously hurt)
• College (misc college stories, including an embedded internship)
• High School (misc high school stories)