atomicthoughts.com

Memory is an odd thing. Once, I broke my elbow. And the other elbow. And a wrist. All at once. It was, by any reasonable estimation, a pretty big deal. But I have no idea when it was. “midish 90′s” I can give you. Sometime in the fall, because I remember getting out of some finals for it. The date can certainly be determined, by asking the less addle brained people in my life at the time. It’s not a factoid I have in my own head though.

On the other hand, I know that I lost in the finals of my middle school spelling bee for spelling legible as ledgeable.

Cassandra got me a little one serving coffee pot for my birthday last year. Or father’s day. Or my anniversary. Or some gift worthy ocassion. Anyway…

It’s perfect for the cup of tea I ocassionally have. It’s also one of those things that’s a really brilliant concept, and you wonder why it took so long to design it that way. The reservoir on the back comes off, the part you need to fill with water to get it all running. Rather than taking the coffee pot and filling it with water, then spilling it on the desk when you fill the reservoir, you just take the reservoir with you to the sink, and you’re done. I love it, and I love good design.

Brilliant! For the very specific way I’m thinking of that word in my head, watch this Guiness commercial.

Of course the card didn’t work. What kind of a fantasy world do you think this is?

A few weeks ago I thought I lost my wallet. The only action I took before finding it was to cancel the cards from my credit union. Okay fine no problem they said, and reissued 2 ATM cards and a Visa card.

Get the cards a week later. “Hey, I need these” I think to myself and put them somewhere very important and memorable so I’ll grab them on the way out of the house. A month later I still can’t remember where that is, so I finally give up and call my credit union back.

Naturally, pride wouldn’t allow me to say “I’m stupid and lost the cards you sent to replace the cards I thought I lost before, can you send me some new ones?” So I went with “I never received the cards.” A few minutes go by and … “Those cards were never reissued. Your current card should work fine.” Now I’m painted in a corner! If I point out their obvious mistake(s) I’ll be found out! “Why did I get a Visa card and not the ATM cards,” I ask? “Maybe the person who reissued that one didn’t understand you wanted both of them cancelled.” Hmm. We verified that my card should still work, and I thanked them for their time.

So somewhere in my house (or, potentially, the landfill. Can never discount random things ending up in the trash. Thanks Isaac!) are 2 ATM cards that were never issued.They magically appeared in my mailbox one day. The magically appeared without the card in my wallet being cancelled. Idiots.

101st gym visit. Since I’ve passed up 100 opportunities to mention this, let me take this opportunity to say . . .

LEAVE YOUR CELL PHONE IN THE LOCKER ROOM

You are not a member of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. You are not the only person with nuclear launch codes. You are not the only brain surgeon for 800 miles who might be called at any second to save a childs life. If you were any of these things, stay home!

Thank you.

Fitlinxx puts me at 99 visits to the Gym. I realized today I usually don’t log in for a “session” on the Wednesday workouts, so it’s probably quite a bit higher. For lack of a better number to hang my hat on, we’ll go with that.

Music is crucial to working out. I use a CD based mp3 player, changing discs maybe once a month. Last week shuffle gave me a nearly perfect cardio playlist, alternating between paces and keeping me going. If you ever need a 30 minute workout mix, this is a pretty good one:

2nd question, for the techies:

Write a method called Anagram that determines whether two strings are anagrams of each other. Two words are anagrams if they contain the same characters in a different order (e.g. “general coding” is an anagram of “a reclined gong”). The method should return a boolean value.

Language doesn’t matter, pseudo code acceptable.