The Weird Stuff I Notice

January 12, 2009

My brain really could stand to pay less attention to some things.

· There's a car in the parking lot, and its license plate is only different in the last two digits. It's a VW, so I assume s/he bought it a month or two before I did from the same dealership. Or, given that the place went out of business a few months after I bought the Jetta, maybe several months before. It'd be really cool, to my dorky brain, if it was a clone of mine, but it's about as far removed as possible while still being the same model. It's white where mine is black, has the 2.5L engine instead of the turbocharged 2.0L, and is the GTI variant. About the only things they have in common are the Jetta badge, the sunroof, and the satellite radio antenna.

· This year, February will fit exactly into four calendar weeks -- the first is a Sunday and the 28th is a Saturday. No big deal, it happens 3 years out of every 28, but this is the first one since I started working here and I was happy to see that the calendars and datepickers I've written actually manage to handle that correctly. Next occurrences will be in 2015, 2026 and 2037. (Previous ones were 1998, 1987, 1981, and then the calendar widget in Windows runs out. My hunch is that 1970 was the last one before that.)

· I've been working on the GPS system since I got here in 2005, so this shouldn't really surprise me any more, but every time I pass a client's bus on the road I check to see if they have the right type of antenna on them. And when they do I have to fight the urge to call up one of my coworkers and ask where that particular bus is. When there were 150 buses in the system it was cool to see evidence that everything worked. With 1,400 in the system, not so much.

January 5, 2009January 19, 2009