Mild Amusement

Silicon Valley is awfully close to the Bay Area, so a lot of its culture seems to bleed over into where I live. It makes sense if you think about it; the people who work there live close by, others want to try to get in on the boom, and Silicon Valley itself is bound to spill over into neighboring areas. Ultimately, I suspect this is why I know multiple people who have ideas about starting their own companies. I don't know that any of them are quitting their jobs and taking out loans against their houses any time soon, but they do have these ideas that they day dream about turning into reality. As it turns out, my brother had one such idea. He thought up a competitor for the technology company Apple. Now, he's not an engineer or an inventor, and he doesn't have a killer product that would make the iPhone look like a kid's toy. However, he DOES have plenty of ideas about how to market a hypothetical product to compete with Apple's line of products. On the off chan...

Today's post is all about the CrossFit workouts that I like to do with a few others at work . I've mentioned them on this blog before, since they can be awfully amusing. Heck, even the process of writing about the work outs is pretty amusing. And since I've been going to that class a little more regularly again, I've picked up a few more amusing stories in the process: Generally speaking, the trainer for the class doesn't tell us what the Workout of the Day (WOD, for short) is going to be. The whole idea is for it to be constantly changing, so as to keep us on our toes and force us to challenge ourselves. That means that he will often say things like, "it's not THAT bad" as he's writing up the WOD. That statement is always followed by a laugh. I don't mean that it's followed by a laugh some of the time, or that he throws in a light chuckle. I mean that he laughs every single time after saying that, and it's a full laugh, the kind th...

(First of all, "logue" isn't really a word. At least it's not a word that I intended to use. So if it actually means something in archaic Olde English or something, that's not what I meant. This post is about the epilogue to the Joys of an Earring 2 post . However, it's only going to make any kind of sense if I first explain the build-up in a prologue. So this post is going to be both a prologue and en epilogue to that earlier post. Hence, the 'logue.) Have you ever come across one of those friends that likes to play with their Facebook identifying details? I have. I have some friends my age who claim to be older than my grandparents. It's kinda funny, but it can also confuse some people. It's particularly interesting when people mess with their relationship status, since that can lead to some interesting conclusions. It leads to really  interesting conclusions if people claim to be married to their best friends. I've seen this a couple of ti...

I wrote once before that having an earring leads to a surprising number of chuckles , and that fact hasn't changed. On some intellectual level, I get that it's an oddity for some people, and that leads to interesting exchanges. But on a more tactical level, the phenomenon of a guy wearing an earring is common enough that it's shown up in popular media across the globe. If nothing else, you figure that these people saw it on TV once or saw it in a movie or something. So you might assume that people would be more or less over it, right? You'd assume wrong. I was sitting in a meeting with a couple of other people at work recently when I was suddenly reminded of this fact. Just to set the stage, these were people that I'm not super close with. I've worked with one for a while and I was just recently introduced to the other one, but it's not like we're going out for drinks after work. I'll happily chat with either of the two, but I wouldn't consider...