~Wednesday~ After shaving this morning, I made a note to check my Google calendar to see when I last put a new blade in my razor. Yes, I do track that on my Google calendar, along with other things, such as when I rotated my tires. Because I know you care, I last changed my razor blade on June 1, 2010.
I had NPR on my radio during my short drive to the bus stop, on which the news was all about the snowpocalypse gripping a good part of the nation:
| Dear NPR:
It’s either “15 degrees below zero” or “negative 15 degrees,” but it’s not “negative 15 degrees below zero,” because as we all know in mathematics: [xy + x(-y)] + (-x)(-y) = xy + [x(-y) + (-x)(-y)] (this is just the distributive law) Consider the first half of the equation: Now consider the second half of the equation: xy + [x(-y) + (-x)(-y)] = xy + [(x – x)(-y)] But the two sides of the equation are the equal. So, if x and y are any two positive numbers, (-x)(-y) = xy. Regards, |
Just sayin’.
On the Wolfline #1 Avent Ferry bus, the guy sitting to the left of me played Solitaire on his phone and smelled slightly of coconuts.
The girl to his left slept sitting up the entire ride, and her lips glistened so much with Vaseline that I’m sure had I been straight, it would have been some kind of turn-on. I’ll have to run that assumption by Brad—my litmus test for all things straight-horny.
A student sitting across from me took me back to my undergraduate days working on my computer science degree. He said to his friend, “Yeah, my program worked, but because I didn’t design it the way the professor wanted it, I didn’t get a good grade.”
That was something that haunted me throughout my college programming classes, and really throughout the time I programmed once I got hired at IBM, which thankfully was only a short period of time until I jumped at the opportunity to move to the test group. I could always do the programming, and eventually get it done, but it was never easy and it was never eloquent.
My ex-wife, on the other hand, was a crackerjack programmer, who not only designed high-performance code easily and efficiently, but also was the type who when she showed up for code reviews, the bugs just surrendered. I swear you could see them get up out of the code, walk to the edge of the conference room table waving their little white flags, and then just jump off. She was that good at seeking out the little buggers.
And in one more paragraph of digression, I can never think about an IBM code review without recalling the time that one of my colleagues—a British gal who took her coding, especially any bugs in it, very, very personally—sat in a code review and just seethed as bug after bug were pointed out until all of a sudden she threw her chair back, stood up, took a look around at the entire group and said, “I think I’ll go get some tea.” She walked down the hall to the little kitchen area, and returned in about ten minutes, in a much better place.
I got so engrossed in this memory and capturing enough of it in the notes on my phone to remind me of later, that when I finally looked up to see where the bus was, I couldn’t grok the location. It was at an intersection, but I couldn’t see the street names, and I didn’t recognize the building to my right. Very disorienting, but once we turned the corner I saw that we were turning onto Dan Allen from Western Boulevard.
I believe I’ve mentioned here before that I work in a “secure” office building on campus, as it houses one of the two data centers for the entire university. To that end, you have to wave a badge in front of a scanner in order to unlock doors that allow you beyond the lobby of the building.
I keep my badge in my wallet in a special slot that displays it without having to open the wallet. It doesn’t look pretty, but no one ever looks at it. For the most part, I just use it to wave in front of scanners to open literal doors or in front of humans to open figurative doors. And don’t ask me what the oblong hole in the middle of that wrinkly plastic cover is for, because I have no idea. This is what it looks like:
I was feeling lazy when I got to the door today, and I didn’t want to pull my wallet out of my shorts pocket to wave in front of the scanner, so I just got all canine and lifted my leg to get scanned through my pants:
Who needs the TSA when I have so much fun on my own!
Attribution: Thanks to my friend and colleague, Vanessa, for taking that picture.
Late in the afternoon, Jen asked me if I wanted to take a “mental health break” with a walk outside. We walked down to the credit union, back down Clark Street, and then back to the office down Gardner Street. Just what the doctor ordered.
In our salon’s Ning (personal space on the Interwebs) Brad made a post about Taylor Mali that led to his website, which Anna followed and which contained a link to Taylor’s blog, which Anna read, and where Taylor posted a recording of poet C.K. Williams reading his poem, “On the Metro.” (You can listen to the 2 min, 45 sec reading by clicking on the link.)
Anna noted that the poem reminded her of my buscapdes, so of course I had to read/hear it. What was so striking about it was a section of it that went like this:
She leans back now, and as the train rocks and her arm brushes mine she doesn’t pull it away;
she seems to be allowing our surfaces to unite: the fine hairs on both our forearms, sensitive, alive,
achingly alive, bring news of someone touched, someone sensed, and thus acknowledged, known.
which was an interesting juxtaposition to my “homoerotic hand placement” scene in yesterday’s buscapdes. Cool.
Dancing was fun enough tonight, and I got a decent amount of exercise in.