Sean is just some guy who lives in the Twin Cities. Updates to this blog are at random intervals.

29 June 2002 - 31 May 2002 - A co-worker of mine mentioned to me that she and her family had to go to a number of graduations all in the same weekend, spread out in different places over the state. "And having the kids in the car for all those hours," she lamented. "The alphabet game, the animal game...it gets kind of sickening after awhile." Of course, if Cindy and I have any kids, we won't teach them any of those games. Our kids are going to play automobile games like "Know your trigonometric identities." "So," my co-worker said after hearing this, "you're going to raise your kids up to be nerds." Well, I wouldn't say that we're going to try raise them that way. But I'm a software engineer, and Cindy is a math teacher. With genetics and environment and everything, they're pretty much doomed. 20 March 2002 - My current work at the office is more of a pain in the ass that it needs to be for no other reason that Americans, for the most part, are all too stupid to convert to the metric system. I mostly work with formatting computer print outs for my job, and it's a lot of trouble to have to take care of formatting documents to both 8-and-a-half by 11-inch Letter size paper (U.S. standard) and A4 paper (standard of everybody else in the world except the U.S.). And make sure that the right format gets sent to the right users. As it happens, I needed to look up the exact dimensions of A4 paper and in doing so found this web site that goes into a lot of detail explaining how cool A4 paper really is. You would think a page explaining about a couple of linear dimensions would be pretty dry, but I was impressed. And that led me to another page all about the metric system, and that's what really got my blood boiling. (Yes, I know I'm a geek, no need to e-mail.) Unfortunately, as long as we've got a president who's likely to say something like "If feet, pounds, and miles were good enough for Jesus, they're good enough for us," the drive to switch to metric is going to be stalled indefinitely. Oh, well. On a slightly related note, I am also on a one-man crusade to get people to start using the Sacagawea dollar instead of dollar bills. (Coins are far less expensive to produce in the long run, and switching to them would save taxpayers lots of money. Dollar coins, once produced, last years and years, while the government has to continually absorb the cost of replacing dollar bills that only endure for eight months or so. No other industrialized country in the world is as dumb as the U.S. and produces bills as valueless as the $1. The Canadian dollar, and the new euro, are both roughly equivalent to the U.S. dollar, and they both produce 1- and 2-unit coins, no bills. The lowest denomination bill for both is the 5.) Actually, maybe this is a two-man crusade; I recently found out that my friend Jerry is on the same mission that I am. So I figured that he would work the east side of the Mississippi, and I would work the west. But ever since Cindy and I have moved to north of St. Paul last summer, half the country is no longer covered and now I don't know what we're going to do. This weekend I bought a counter sink at Menards and paid for it with two quarters, a Sacagawea dollar, and a Susan B. Anthony dollar which I also happened to have on me at the time. "I've never gotten either of these things before," the clerk informed me. Alas, our work is not yet done. 20 February 2002 - So recently there's been a popular news story about Skittles, a cat who got lost in southern Wisconsin while his owner was on vacation last Labor Day weekend. Then, a couple weeks ago, the cat suddenly showed up on the owner's front door, in northern Minnesota, 350 miles away. All the local television stations dispatched reporters to cover the story. Lots of people at work were all talking about it. After 140 days of being missing, God love him, suddenly Skittles the miracle cat is back, except his claws were worn down, and he was much, much thinner. Yeah, and also, Skittles was now a different color. And doesn't answer to "Skittles" anymore. OK, I admit it, I'm a bit skeptical. Three hundred fifty miles is a long distance, and I'm assuming that the cat didn't know enough to take I-94 most of the way. An animal expert who was interviewed did mumble something about polarity in cat brains or something. But the local TV journalists, eager to find a nice "feel good" story in this day and age, later admitted that they didn't investigate the facts too deeply. I just can't believe a cat could find his way back cross-country, all that way, in completely unfamiliar territory. Hell, my fiancee has lived in the Twin Cities for two years now, a very smart woman, and she can barely find our favorite restaurant on her own. How much less chance would a cat have? I'm not making that up about Cindy, either. Once not long ago she had a doctor's appointment in Roseville, and afterwards we had agreed to meet at our restaurant for dinner, also in Roseville nearby. After she was finished at the doctor's, she drove all the way home to Little Canada, and then drove to the restaurant to meet me. Because that's the only way she knows how to get there. I thought this was pretty weird of her at first. But then after thinking about it, the process became logical. She's a math teacher. Like any good mathematician, she just figured out the way there by reducing the situation to a previously solved problem.