Apparently I don’t reek of hot dogs, apple pie, or unearned arrogance. Over the last week I’ve thrice been mistaken for Israeli at the office - or at least someone who understands Hebrew. One man introduced himself in Hebrew; another used the language of the Talmud to ask me if the purse on the chair over there was mine. It wasn’t.

I can’t help ( Read more... )

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I seem to be adopting the linguistic cadences and mannerisms of the people around me. “Synchronous Ajax calls, ehhhh…” I wave my hand in the air dismissively and skip right over the verb. “… not very good for user experience.” If only it were possible to learn Hebrew this way.

We’re working in one large room, desks without cubicles, so whenever ( Read more... )

Thanks for the nudge, virtualcourtney. It has been an embarrassingly long time.

Late Saturday night I went to sleep, ostensibly a heathly human being. Late Sunday morning I woke up with multiple systems failure. Moving hurt. Swallowing hurt. Two hours later I was contemplating my dreary existence in a cold sweat, sprawled across my bathroom floor, unwilling ( Read more... )

• The Tel Aviv trip has been postponed by one month - I now leave on May 18.
• My iBook is dead; long live my MacBook Pro. (HOLY SHIT THIS THING IS FAST)
• No, seriously. This deserves a bullet point of its own. This computer could beat my iBook in a race even if it and had no feet and had to run backwards.
• Thank You For Smoking is really good. I ( Read more... )

So I’m finally headed to Tel Aviv on April 20. I’ll be there for two whole weeks giving HTML support to one of our product teams.

Any suggestions on what the hell I should do once I’m there? Specific travel tips? (I plan on bringing my own Sausage, Egg & Cheese McMuffins.) The only advice my father gave me was to stay away from bars and buses. ( Read more... )

I've wished for a lot of things over the words, posts, months, and years of this journal. Nearly all of it has been oversimplification. I wished for platitudes I thought were wisdom.

I fantasized about penetrating insights - following a beacon of truth to its logical and geographical end. I wanted to know so badly.

This turns out to be exhausting ( Read more... )

Judge references Billy Madison in recent opinion. If I were a judge, this is how I would write all my opinions: with derision, arrogance, and bizarre references to pop culture.

You’re not exactly Professor Frink, I tell myself; you could fill a continent with the throngs of people who make a living doing something far dorkier. Still, lately I’ve been flying smaller and smaller circles around this idea, and maybe it’s worth mentioning. But maybe not.

It might be a by-product of getting older, or it may be that I’m ( Read more... )

Yesterday I got an unsolicited commercial e-mail from "Penis J. Episode." I thought to myself: if I were creating a spambot, wouldn't I want to pull the word 'penis' out of its wordbank?

On a related note, my favorite ridiculous fake name is "Erection Catrape, DDS." Someone used it on the Something Awful Forums and I was incapacitated by ( Read more... )