Mild Amusement

This story started out innocently: a few of us decided to carpool to a group outing. It made a lot more sense than driving multiple cars to lunch and then driving those same cars back to the exact same place from where we started. So, we all met up at the appointed time, give or take some tardiness, and headed to lunch. Now, the friend who drove has purchased a new car since the last time I saw her. So, someone made an off-hand remark about how it'd be my first time in her car. There was all manner of banter about the pomp and circumstance necessary for this momentous occasion, and we all shared a few laughs about it all. Since there were three of us, though, someone had to sit in the backseat. That's where this story started to get far more amusing. Since I tend to have shorter legs than many of the other folks I hang out with, I'm very used to sitting in the back, particularly that middle seat in the back. And, since this is such a common occurrence, I immediately vol...

For the most part, my job doesn't require me to be up late at night. It's pretty rare these days that I have to be logged on to my work machine once I get home. Sure, I interact with people in other parts of the world, but for the most part, we can get it all done within the confines of our regular business hours. That said, a very coincidental set of circumstances has made me decide that I can't wait until the next time that I do have to be awake for this. The first part of this story starts with a work snippet. I support an application that gets used at all hours of the day, and one day, we started seeing intermittent errors in the middle of the night. They just started at 3AM for no apparent reason, even though no one had changed anything (at least not that I'm aware of). The worst part was that they were intermittent errors, so it became much harder to reproduce the errors or troubleshoot what was going on. Regardless, someone suggested I check the credentials,...

So, I like to stay active, and that sometimes involves CrossFit . If you've never tried it for yourself, one of the hallmarks of this particular style of workout is that you're constantly doing something different. I've been asked to perform all sorts of new movements that I'd never considered before. Now, before you start questioning this, I've always been taught proper technique and form long before I had to actually perform the exercise with any kind of weight in my hands. So, it should be fairly safe if done properly. That said, constantly having to do new exercises means that I routinely get coaching for the proper form for a movement. Even for things that I now take for granted, someone is always watching and calling me out if I'm starting to slip. It's not uncommon for someone to tell me to keep my chest up (so you don't put a heavy strain on your lower back). For someone as anal and detail oriented as me, that is incredibly helpful. I general...

I've occasionally had people tell me that I have a very distinct way of communicating. I've got a "style," if you will. Now, I pretty much only know one way to talk: the way I talk. It's not like I have put countless of hours into crafting a new persona or figuring out how to piece words together. For better or for worse, it's an innate style. Most of the time, I don't really think about it. It's one of those curious little facts that people have thrown my way and I have retained (sort of like how I know that Japanese has a word for " someone who is so good they are legendary "). However, it's recently come up in enough ways that it's led to a few laughs, and several at my expense. First of all, it turns out that I write very much like I talk. I've never really thought about it, but that makes some sense. It's pretty natural to try to translate your actual speech into written speech, I think. Either way, this came up when ...