Elevator Etiquette

The other day I got in the elevator after locking my bike up on P1, there was already someone in the elevator who has pressed their floor (I think it was 4), so as usual, I pressed my floor (higher than 4) , the doors closed and we were merrily on our way. We got to the 4th floor, the doors open... and no one moves. I sort of glanced over at her in a "I'm not leering" kind of way, but got no reaction. The doors close, at which point I assume that she's forgotten something in her car and needs to head back down to get it, so she's just going to stay in the elevator and go back down. But just as the doors are opening at my floor, I see her snap back to coherence and press 4 again.

Should I have alerted her that 4, the button she pressed, was probably where she wanted to get off while the doors were open? Should I have coughed to get her attention? Or should I have just assumed she knew what she was doing (as I did)?

-kdh

How to waste a day 20 minutes at a time

Warning: don't follow this link unless you have some time to waste: ted.com. I don't remember how I ran across this site, but I know that I had seen it before without exploring the whole site. Basically, the site is a collection of talks and performances taken from a conference that brings together 'experts' from the worlds of "Technology, Entertainment, Design", although I think it covers more than just those categories.

I particularly like watching the talks that cover the areas where have an innate interest in the subject (admittedly, it's often anything to do with numbers or the environment), but I haven't really run across any that I didn't find fascinating.

Here are a couple of my favorites:

• Benjamin Zander talks about music and passion.
• Hans Rosling plays with world statistics in a really cool way
• Erin McKean (a lexicographer) talks about the history and future of the dictionary
  

-kdh

44th!!!

Well, we've returned from Nashville where my quartet finished 44th. We were pretty happy with out performance although we were singing in a pretty tough spot, first out of the gate in between previous champs "Realtime" and this year's eventual winner "O.C. Times". As for the scores (76.9%), I think we had hoped they would be a little bit higher, but we're not really worried about them all that much.

I always find internationals has a strange ambivalent effect on me. On one hand, watching great quartets is inspiring and motivates me to get better at this hobby. On the other hand, I watch the top 10 (or even top 20) quartets and think that I'll never be that good, no matter how hard I work. Oh well, such is life, I guess.