Online Real-Time

Two Christmases ago was a busy season for funerals. I wrote to you about it.

Among the losses was a new friend and coworker, whom we'd dubbed "Online Real-Time" for his general lack of a brain-to-mouth filter. That's a character defect for most people, but Justin was such a genuinely good man that it was nearly always on the endearing-to-hilarious spectrum.

So. Fifteen minutes ago I was updating one of my code repos at work. I pulled down my counterpart's latest changes, tried to do a build, and my development environment complained that it couldn't find a new form interface it needed:

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We hide things in the software you run. We bury our frustrations in comments. We name things after inside jokes. I once got a bug fix ticket that simply read "please make your error logging less witty."

Sometimes we bury a tribute where you will never see it.

Nerds, you can be pretty great sometimes.

The Big Push Begins

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We finished reading Because of Winn-Dixie last night. In it there is a candy, the Littmus Lozenge, that tastes sweet and like sadness at the same time. People can't stop eating it.

I'm thinking about that candy today.

(Incidentally, if you haven't read Kate DiCamillo, read literally everything she's ever done. She has the rare stuff. Every one of her books is a Littmus Lozenge.)

Obviously, You're Not a Golfer

I read to my daughter's kindergarten class today. Today being April 20th.

I read them Oliver Jeffers' Stuck, an absurdist kids' story about a boy who gets a surprising amount of stuff stuck in a tree while trying to get his kite down.

Why did I bring up the date, 4/20, which alert internet readers will recognize as the Marijuana Number?

Because I discovered that when you have a Q&A session with a bunch of six-year-olds, you get to have exactly the same conversations you had when you were twenty and doing bong rips.

Possible theories they had on how all the stuff (including a house, a large ship, and a blue whale) stayed stuck in the tree:

  • Glue tree
  • Tape tree
  • Tree that is not made of glue or tape but has it, like, on the leaves?
  • Tree leaves are actually super-strong Venus flytraps that grab onto the stuff
  • Tree is not an actual tree but instead a tree-shaped robotic mechanism controlled internally by an evil man bent on getting things stuck in tree simulacra

I floated the possibility of an implausibly gravity-dense tree and blew their fucking faces off.

This led to the probably-inevitable "whoa, knrk knrk, uh, what if there WASN'T gravity, man?!?!?!?" bongwater philosophy discussion that so many of us have enjoyed in our respective youths.

We agreed that no gravity would be a cool thing if you had a space helmet and a trampoline and a hammer to smash through asteroids. Because we are reasonable people.

Then they all drew silly stories. It was more than I'd hoped it would be. I got two hugs and a 'splodin' knucks at the end.

One of the hugs rubbed off a strong artificial apple-cinnamon incense smell on me, so to complete the day's theme, I now smell like a head shop.