Results of the first experiment based on last Tuesday's decision to start verbalizing about what I think I'm reading off other people: guarded success. I won't call it an unqualified success, since it was over coffee and dinner with Andrew the Mad Physicist(1), who's about the bluntest person I know, but it certainly seemed to work.

I don't get a chance to spend much time with Andrew without it turning into some kind of one-upsmanship contest, so encounters like tonight are refreshing. Both of us had enough to vent about that we just didn't feel like focusing on being clever, I guess.

Huh. I was about to go on at length about him summing up his rather dour opinion of Leo, and speculate on whether he was being honest or just vitriolic, but that difference for some reason doesn't matter to me any more. He can be vitriolic and still be honest. They're not mutually exclusive.

Short takes:

• Chris finished his Neon Genesis Evangelion video to "Everlong" by the Foo Fighters. It's on my FTP in RealVideo (13MB) and MPEG-1 (33MB). I think it's groovy, especially for a first effort.


• Yet again, someone mistakes me for significantly older than I really am, based on my written communication. A theory, inspired by Mad Andrew's Exponential Cat Hypothesis (2): The years during which a person is married age the person per the square of the actual number of years. So, having been married for 3 calendar years, I'm now 23 going on 30.


• The most frightening physical object in the universe: a Post-It note on your monitor, bearing the words "Please come see me" in your boss's handwriting. (Fortunately, he just wanted some trouble shot. Why he couldn't have just forwarded me the email which already described the problem which had landed in his lap, which he ended up having to do anyway, is beyond me. Maybe Roger just gets his jollies by freaking out employees.)


(1) At last count, I know and am in at least semi-regular contact with five separate Andrews. One is a DHTML programmer in Redmond, Washington who does not in fact work for Microsoft; one is a hypnotist in Green Bay, Wisconsin; one is the viola-playing MIB cell leader for Houston; one keeps a journal here; and one is getting his master's in physics at Rice. That last Andrew is the one I'm talking about. He is quite mad, in both senses of the term -- Warren Ellis has nothing on this guy.

(2) The effective amount of damage/mischief/chaos wreaked by cats in an apartment is directly proportional to the square of the actual number of cats in the apartment. Currently I have two cats, who together create as much disorder as any four cats would independently. So imagine what my old place looked like when we had three cats, one of whom suddenly had four kittens ...