I think I’ve determined why I like Legos. The ones I like are designed for 5-12 year olds; since it appears that I have the attention span of a 5 year old, it is perfect for me! Seriously, my attention span for things that aren’t work related is very short (I probably have some form of ADD) and my mind wanders a lot onto many different topics and things to do. This is a blessing and a curse; I’ve packed a ton of knowledge in my head, but I’m always thinking which can make it hard to sleep and relax.
Reliving my childhood
As part of reliving my childhood, I’ve started to collect Legos as I had to give mine up in one of our moves. The Lego sets these days seem so much more sophisticated than what I remember. The Lego City series look neat (OK, maybe I never grew up), so I’ve bought a few of the pieces. During the assembly process (it is so much easier to put these together after going through high school and college :-)), I’ve noticed a number of things about Legos that most people probably wouldn’t notice. For instance, the scale of some of the pieces is totally out of whack. One of the pieces I have is a police dog that is about half the size of the police officer (this is the dog’s body, not head), so that’s a pretty big dog. In the rescue helicopter I put together, it has wheels. I’ve been on a rescue helicopter; it has skids. Maybe some helicopters have wheels, but I don’t think it is common. I know I’m over analyzing things, but I can’t help myself.I also noticed that the rescue collection uses the Star of Life logo which is a registered trademark of the US Department of Transportation. Do I think that Lego has permission to use this logo? I really don’t think so. The trademark for the symbol says: THE CERTIFICATION MARK IS USED BY PERSONS AUTHORIZED BY APPLICANT TO CERTIFY THAT EMERGENCY MEDICAL CARE VEHICLES MEET U.S. DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION STANDARDS (CLASS A), THE EMERGENCY MEDICAL CARE PERSONNEL OPERATING THE VEHICLE HAVE BEEN TRAINED TO MEET U.S. DEPARTMENT OF TRANSPORTATION STANDARDS (CLASS B), OR BOTH. Do the Lego toys meet this requirement? Are the little EMTs in the set well trained? Does the ambulance meet the DOT standards? It doesn’t make any noise (unless I try to sound like an ambulance), so I know it doesn’t have a siren. In any case, I’m having a good time assembling my kits. I just need to find a place to put my new toy collection.
To be a kid again
Last weekend, my wife and I went up to Downtown Disney in Anaheim to have dinner with her parents. While we were there, we stopped into the Lego store. I was a big fan of Legos when I was young, but in one of our family moves, I had to give them up. As I started looking around the store, I was in heaven with all the Legos there; I’m particularly fond of the City collections as I used to build my own little cities before they really had the themes. The prices of the Legos were not all the unreasonable to a working professional, but when I was young, Legos almost seemed out of reach due to not having a job. If I could be a kid again earning a nice living, that would be cool as I could buy all the Legos I wanted!
While I can’t be a kid again, I can at least try to re-live my childhood by building up a Lego collection again.
Social experiment
My wife and I went shopping for a piano last week and as a little experiment, I decided to see if the salesman would really talk to us. I wore shorts and had on my Teva sandals. My wife and I look pretty young, so we’re usually ignored or get poor service. When we walked into the store, we went over to one of the least expensive pianos and started looking. The first salesman asked if we needed help, we said we were just looking. The second salesman that came over to us not only didn’t ignore us, but spent a lot of time talking to us and telling us about the pianos. In addition, he took us to more expensive pianos! I was pretty shocked, but pleased with the service. I wish more places (including restaurants) were age-blind and treated us like we should be treated.
I did it!
Today I ran and finished the Rock ‘N’ Roll Marathon. I knew in my heart that by training for it, I could run a marathon, but I proved it to myself (and to my family). Luckily I had my whole family cheering me on. I managed to do, what I consider, a reasonable time of 4:14:54, but my goal was to just finish.
There were times on the course where I was hurting pretty bad, but I just kept telling myself I had to finish. My Garmin Forerunner 305 kept me up-to-date and performed flawlessly, unlike one of the guys next to me at the starting line that was quite annoyed when his unit didn’t turn on. I slowed down considerably in the last half of the race, but finished with a pace of about what I normally did on long runs. All the gory details are over on MotionBased, but please don’t laugh! I managed to cross the finish line on my own power and wasn’t carted off in an ambulance. Overall, it was a good day. I’m sure I’ll be hurting for a few more days. I think the jury is still out on if I’m going to put myself through this torture next year.
Am I too thick headed to see something funny?
Recently I’ve heard a bit about the movie Napolean Dynamite and I’m not sure what the attraction to the movie is. I saw the movie in December and did not funny it at all funny; in fact, I thought it was quite stupid. Others seem to think it is one of the funniest movies ever. What am I missing?
Is my job easy?
I sure hope my job isn’t easy, because if it was, I’m definitely doing something wrong because it isn’t easy for me. Over the years, I’ve heard people say that other jobs are easy or are hard without ever experiencing them. Take teaching, for example, outsiders think that teachers get it easy with summers off and leave school around 2:30 pm or so. What they don’t see is teachers getting up at 6:15 am, staying at school until 4 pm and then coming home and doing lesson planning for awhile (at least the dedicated ones). Do I know what it is like to be a teacher? Not really, I’ve given a few lectures for my local CERT, taught CPR and First Aid in college, but I really don’t know what it is like to be a teacher day in and day out. However, my experiences have shown me that it is damn hard to prepare for a simple lecture and can’t imagine what it is like to prepare for 5 classes a day.
What about my job? Well, as I say, if it was easy, everyone would be doing it. There are some “easy” parts of my job, but they don’t last long because easy usually means done quickly so they’re over and done with in the blink of an eye. Some people think that a feature or a design is easy just because some other application may have implemented it. Do I have any idea how long someone else spent implementing something? A feature may look simple on the surface, but the time and effort implementing a feature could be huge.
If I ever say that someone else’s job is easy (and I haven’t done that job myself), I need to remind myself that I need to be slapped.
Being handy is a double edged sword
I grew up learning how to fix things around the house, from the simple changing a light bulb to the complex installing a ceiling fan (which almost took out my head when my dad hadn’t quite secured it and yanked me out of the way just in time). Then when I owned my own house, I taught myself about network wiring, replacing a garbage disposal, and then stereo installation. Being handy, does however, come at a price. Just because I can do something doesn’t mean I want to, but I can’t justify paying someone else to do something I can do myself. There are exceptions to this, but things like fixing a toilet don’t justify calling a plumber for $65 an hour to replace the flush handle or something like that. I don’t enjoy many aspects of do-it-yourself work, but since I have the knowledge, I do it anyway. My next little project is to figure out why the toilets occasionally run (it has something to do with the stupid chain from the lever to that plastic flap); I dread it, but I’d feel like an idiot calling out a plumber to do a simple task like that.
Where’s the D drive?
I’ve been listening to Black by Christpher Whitcomb and as I was listening today, my ears perked up when I heard that one of the characters had an iMac. It was described as being chrome and ivory, so I was trying to figure out if it was an iMac G4 or G5. Yeah, I realize I’m a geek for even thinking about that. A little bit later, the author describes how the character put a CD into the D drive on the computer. Hmmm…I’ve been using Macs for 18 years and I still haven’t seen a D except when using Virtual PC, but I’m sure the author wasn’t talking about that.
Do I smell that bad?
I realize that I don’t usually shower until the afternoon as I work from home, but I don’t think I smell so bad that it would cause my neighbors to sell their houses. Lately, we’ve noticed a number of houses in our neighborhood up for sale with some sitting for awhile. Maybe it is just getting close to summer and people think it is the right time to sell to cash out or maybe it is just too expensive to live here. I just hope that they get top dollar so that if/when we ever decide to sell, we also can get a nice sale price.