Sunday, May 25, 2008

Random Thoughts

Sunday morning here in sunny Alaska California. My neighbors are all out for their morning walks in their down jackets and heavy sweatshirts, arms wrapped around themselves, wondering about this global warming thing.
The furnace is roaring away, preserving life as we know it in the Jayhawk household.

Offshore, bubbles are rising in desultory fashion from where the Clinton campaign is resting on the bottom. Pieces of its shattered timbers wash onto the beach from time to time, but souvenir hunters spurn them in favor of shiny shells.

My wife and are both uttering excited murmurings of "Indy" but have two different things in mind. I'm talking about an open-wheel auto race, she's talking about a movie we're going to later in the day. She's more excited than I am, but the day bodes well.

If you see a gas station in San Diego selling unleaded regular at $3.999 per gallon, it's because they have an older type of pump and they cannot set the price higher than that. The average here is now $4.04 per gallon, and would be higher if there weren't so many stations with those older pumps. All signs either read the lower figure, or they jump to $4.14 or more.

My niece's blog post this morning described how the "enter" key has quit working on her keyboard, and it reminded me of a time that the "w" key quit on mine. You don't realize how often you use the "w" either, Barbara, until you can't. I would be cursing and pounding my finger on the offending key, and one day I realized there was a lesson there in personal dynamics.

What I realized was that the computer didn't know I was pressing the button because it had disconnected that button. As a result, the pressee was calm and collected, and the presser was losing his cool. The person pressing the button expects a certain response and, when the button has been disconnected, doesn't get it. Pressing a disconnected button is infuriating to the presser. It doesn't bother the one with the button who has disconnected it.

I realized, somewhere along the way, I didn't need to make the world stop pressing my buttons. I could just rewire the buttons.

2 comments:

  1. I think someone would love to tear my laptop apart to rewire teh buttons, but I won't let her. She has to wait for her dad to "help." I well remember the time she had taken a some of keys off a keyboard to do something to it years ago. She put them back on but decided to switch the "w"and "e" keys around when putting it back together. This would be the same girl that was singing the hymn backwards this morning, again. BTW, she is a licensed operator! (Only for that one, but hey...)

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  2. Anonymous1:55 PM

    Knowing that girl, I would lay odds that she was getting all the word right, and in perfect reverse order...

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