Mild Amusement

I'm not the biggest fan of Daylight Saving Time. For one, I get up really early to begin with, so it's not like it does me any good to have sunrise be off by an hour. There are pretty good odds that I'm going to get up when it's dark no matter what the clock says. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly to me, it doesn't really seem to work (as a quick example,  see the last item on the History Channel's article ). Basically, we spend all this effort to try to get a benefit, but it doesn't seem to materialize. So why bother? Regardless of how I feel about it, though, that's how everyone does things where I live. It's not like I can wage a one-man boycott of Daylight Saving Time. I will inevitably have to meet with someone, either for work or for pleasure, and bad things would happen if we had two different ideas of when 10AM was. Basically, I have to play along because time is one of those things that everyone relies on. So, when it was the app...

My parents like to cook , so they spend a fair bit of time working with recipes. My Mom likes to try new recipes, so it's not uncommon for her to decide to make a new recipe out of the blue. I've seen her make biriyani at home, for example. We don't have cultural roots in that part of the world, but she figured it'd be fun to make, so she tried her hand at it (I liked it well enough). The interesting bit, though, is that they try to perfect certain recipes. Once they've tried it once or twice, they'll try to get the flavors and the textures just right. It often makes for some good meals, because these are people who care about how the food comes out. In general, that one fact tends to make the end result better. The funny thing to me, though, has always been just how striving for perfection shows up in day-to-day life. Specifically, overhearing my parents talk about what they want to change for a particular dish leads to some comically precise discussio...

It's funny how work settings tend to play out. For the most part, everyone tends to dial things down, because they don't want to cause drama or otherwise rock the boat. That doesn't mean that everything has to be entirely bland, but you also hear a lot fewer off-color jokes. It's just safer that way. Still, every now and then, a situation calls for some wacky humor. In this particular case, one of my coworkers was dealing with someone who just wouldn't stop talking. I wasn't there for the actual conversation, but apparently this person didn't catch any of the social cues and insisted on continuing the conversation. He just kept right on droning on, hoping to achieve some goal in the process. As you can imagine, said coworker was not particularly thrilled. She looked around to see if anyone else could bail her out of this situation, but alas, no one was to be found. She was stuck. Many hours later, she would then recount this tale of woe, and lament t...

It's not much of a secret, but I tend to have some awfully nerdy habits and hobbies. I used to have a standing chess game with a coworker , fercryinoutloud. There's really not much I can do about hiding the fact at that point. If he looks like a nerd and talks like a nerd, he's probably a nerd. That said, I am not one hundred percent nerdy about everything. Frankly, I'm not even sure that's possible. I'm not sure I could read for hours, play multiple games of chess, watch several hours of science fiction television, AND write a bunch of code in a single day. I still have to eat and sleep, after all. Heck, I have a day job, too. Basically, for all that I am a nerd, there are certain areas of nerd-dom that are foreign to me. One such area is Dungeons & Dragons . I know what it is in general, but I've never played a single game. I don't know that I have any objections to it, I just never got into the game. I'm guessing a part of it was that I di...