the frig blig

This afternoon I attended the annual membership meeting of the Seattle Go Center. In my younger days I was pretty good at attending annual membership meetings, enjoying the feeling of participatory democracy and being engaged in my community. Nowadays my first impulse is to dismiss these meetings as a waste of time. But A encouraged me to go, so I went and it wasn’t as bad as I feared. Perhaps I knew a thing or two in my younger days.

Sitting in my chair listening to the President give his report, I let my gaze wander around the room, observing the other attendees… and I noticed a non-board-member (such as myself) who’s face appeared almost identical to that of the President. I looked back and forth quickly a few times and indeed I couldn’t find any unique characteristics to unambiguously distinguish between the two.

This has happened to me before, in meetings I attend downtown for work. It took me three meetings before I figured out how to tell the difference between two guys from other departments. Turns out one wears glasses and the other doesn’t.

My failure to notice this right off is possibly a result of Asperger syndrome. Whatever you want to call it, this afternoon’s repeat of this experience of seeing duplicate persons in a meeting makes me think that I have a harder time with faces than the average person.

S and I caught 20 Riverside at Tost in Fremont last night. So danceable! This young Everett band rocked the house so hard I felt sorry for the next band. Catch ‘em if you can.

I’ve been working at the cmd line for lo these many years and this morning did a double-take when a simple directory listing displayed parentheses around the file size field for some of the files — to wit:


d:\t>dir mpatch
Volume in drive D is data
Volume Serial Number is 449E-5616

d:\t>


If anyone knows what this means I’d sure love to hear it. So far Googling hasn’t evinced the answer.

What a weird thing to wake up to!

And now look, my pasted screen scrape dir listing above is being formatted by HTML or Wordpress — I enclosed it inside a ‘code’ block but apparently there’s more to instructing “hands-off, no formatting” than that. No time to fix it now, I’ll get that later.

Read award-winning economist Paul Krugman’s analysis of the latest bank bailout plan, as published by the New York Times. He’s “more than disappointed”, which is depressing.

Upon reading news of ‘the world’s cheapest car’ it made me notice an apparent contradiction between people’s efforts trying to slow global warming, and trying to slow global economic recession. Bailing out the U.S. automakers, for instance — possibly helps slow the recession, while possibly hurting the environment.

Which leads me to the headline question: Did mother nature have a hand in causing the global economic recession, in order to slow global warming? Could Mona be another ‘invisible hand’ on the market of which economists speak?

Sometimes it’s fun to look down.

On the Metro 7 standing room only
headed west on Jackson –
is that my cellphone ringing in my pocket?
I hate it when I hallucinate getting phone calls.
I hate it hearing that darn ringtone in my head all day
like a bad song on the radio taking up permanent airplay in my head
until it’s dislodged by the next one…
But oh! The unmistakable piercing tone (broop!) of a voice message –
yikes, I missed three calls on that bus.
I am somebody!

Here we are in 2009 and when I close a Microsoft Word document, it still asks me if I want to save my changes — when I haven’t made any changes to the document at all. For some unexplained reason Word thinks that printing a document changes its content. I remember this behavior all the way back to Winword (I’m not even going to attempt to recall the version number — even then in the days of Windows 3.1 you couldn’t trust version numbers to reflect reality).

I wonder if Microsoft considers this a feature instead of a bug. It’s mildly annoying to have to perform an extra click to a superfluous question when closing the app. It’s downright weird considering how long this behavior has been around.