Monthly Archives: December 2003

Right now my left hand and my right hand are at polar disagreement with my brain… I’m working on a new laptop and the keyboard setup is different than what I’m used to. Y’see, early this year I started to notice some twinges in my wrists, a possible precursor to carpal tunnel badness… So I did some poking around into improving laptop ergonomics and switched my machine over to a Dvorak keyboard. I even swapped the key caps around so that I could look down and see what it was that I was writing. It took a bit of getting used to, especially since I was switching back and forth between Dvorak and QWERTY depending on which computer I was at, but so far it seems to have done the trick… My aches and pains have receded.
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Why do so many math story problems have trains leaving Chicago? Seriously, in some strange alternate universe created and influenced by the writers of math textbooks, there exits a Chicago with no trains left in it… All of them have departed for other cities at a rate of 60 MPH…

Got a little bit of Christmas shopping done last night… Mostly it involved looking around some of the boutique shops near the Michigan Theatre and seeing what they had that might be cool to get for people, then going somewhere less trendy that has the same thing for half the price. One of the perils of a college town is that the shops nearest to campus tend to inflate prices astronomically, mostly because they know that they’ve got a captive audience with little experience in handling a personal budget.
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We just (as in about an hour ago) had a home-smoked fish dinner from a recipe that my wife found in a “Food of China” book. It was really quite tasty, but we’re probably never going to make it again.
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Which Historical Lunatic Are You?
From the fecund loins of Rum and Monkey.

Ok, we just had an odd office discussion based on something over at the book of ratings. Basically, we got into a debate over which spy car accessory you’d most like to have. Most of our wishes were, predictably, based on the poor Ann Arbor driving situation. WorkKevin wanted tractor/repulsor beams to move people off the road. My boss was more interested in a sort of energy field that would slow things down gradually as they got closer to the car. I decided to avoid traffic entirely with some of those folding hover-tire things from the DeLorean at the end of “Back to the Future.”
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One of the fun things post-holiday is hearing what your co-workers have been up to… My boss had nine or so folks over to his place. He enjoys cooking as much as I do, so he was looking forward to preparing a feast for his extended family. Of course, everyone brought a little something to contribute as well, so there was enough to feed an army…
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