Mild Amusement

For reasons unknown to me, people in my life have occasionally asked if I was in the military. I once hypothesized that it had something to do with my gait . As it turns out, I now know why. Well, I have a better idea now. First, though, let me start by saying that I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. I have enough respect for the members of the armed services ("home of the free because of the brave" comes to mind) that I am pleasantly surprised if people ask me this. However, I've never served in any kind of military branch. Hell, I've never even played on an organized sports team. However, this observation is not a coincidence. It has come up too many times, in too many ways, for it to be one person's wild imagination. No, it's come up surprisingly often: Vendors in a different continent entirely asked me out of the blue I briefly mentioned this in the linked blog post, but a few coworkers and I were walking around a look out point du...

I've mentioned before that I seem to enjoy teaching , to various degrees. This came as a bit of a surprise to me, since I never really imagined myself as a teacher. It's not exactly like I had visions of myself at a chalkboard with chalk in hand as a little boy. However, I've done various activities that have involved teaching people things over the years, and I have thoroughly enjoyed the experience. It's actually kind of fun most of the time. As with everything on this blog, though, it certainly leads to its share of laughs. For starters, I have a rule: "if you've got jokes, so do I." I've mentioned it briefly before (namely, in that blog post I linked at the beginning), but it leads to a surprising amount of banter with students. For the most part, it just sort of happens. Still, a couple of memorable examples come to mind: I always introduce myself to the class during the first session, but I don't give them my full life story. I tell them...

So, at some point, my friends and family decided to start something called " Wife Watch " for me. It was a joke, really, but my sister in law was trying to scope out potential partners for me. It was all quite amusing, since she and my brother could be quite brazen about all of this. Of course, that was over three years ago, so the people around me have had more time to add to the list of stories. Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you the latest edition of Wife Watch: The first entry goes to my sister in law, because of course it does. It was her idea from the beginning, so it should come as no surprise that she has another contribution to the list. This time, she thought that I might be interested in her coworker. Both she and said coworker live far enough away that it'd involve some planning to see them, but that was apparently a trivial detail/objection. In fact, when the two of them randomly happened to have lunch much closer to me, my sister in law practically ...

Over the course of writing these blog posts, I have touched upon several sliding scales that have come up in my every day life. Some of these are useful to measure dichotomies , like the opera-wife beater scale that my friend came up with to describe class versus crass. Others have been more useful as a means of trying to objectively measure various qualitative values. For example, banter with friends has led to formulas and scales to measure both how full someone really is and how much pain a guy is really in . To this day, though, I still think that the crazy scale was my favorite. If you can't be bothered to click the link to my old post, my brother basically came up with a way to measure how crazy he thought some of the Mild Ex'es were. There were categories, each category had a weight, and there was even a hotness factor thrown in to help determine how much crazy one should be willing to put up with. Basically, it was like another version of the crazy/hot scale from H...

So, I have an Asian last name. I understand some of the cultural mores and a small amount of Cantonese. I can even  pronounce some of it surprisingly well . While no one is going to confuse me for the most traditional Chinese person ever, I also don't feel like I'm out of place with my Chinese family. Heck, I even manage to surprise people every now and again . Of the limited Chinese I do understand, though, there are a few that have come up in amusing ways. I have a friend who will occasionally respond to IM's (side note: the phrase "IM messages" just seems wrong to me, because the second word is redundant) with a "hai!" She's basically just saying "yes" in another language. It's simple enough language that I understand it, but I'm always amused. It's a little bit like someone who will say " danke " or " grazie " instead of "thank you." It's sort of endearing in its own way. However, the...

A while back, I was asked to work on a project at work. The details aren't particularly important, except for one things. The application allows users to approve or deny a request that can potentially affect our department significantly. You wouldn't think that this would be particularly amusing, or even interesting, but trust me on this one. Sometimes, there are quite a few laughs to be had for work-related matters . So, let's start with some background information. One of the things you try to do when building a web site/application is to use common patterns that people are used to. It makes it easier if they don't have to re-learn everything. The icon for saving something is often a floppy disk , for that very reason. People just know what that means. You wouldn't pick an arbitrary image, since that would just confuse your users. Okay, so you pick patterns that people know. Basically, you copy off of other people. And if there's already a similar appli...

I am at the age where a bunch of friends either have kids or are due to have kids soon. For the most part, this is not a big deal for me, since I am quite used to being around munchkins. I'm going to be kind of confused when they grow up, since that'll be a new experience for me. For the moment, though, I get to see lots of munchkins. One thing I've noticed, however, is that some of these kids are WAY more stylish than I ever was. Yes, yes, the parents obviously have a hand in this. But some of it is also the kids, right? I mean, you could slap the latest Paris runway fashions on my body and I'd look preposterous. You still have to pull off the look. And man, do these kids have a head start in that department. Let's start with a birthday party for some munchkins I happened to attend. One little girl, probably about 5 or 6, came running up to her mom at one point and asked if she could take off her shoes. We were in a playground thing, so I figured she just wante...