Marketing

There was a guy I worked with when we were younger, who I was friends with. He's likable. We were both computer programmers, though he was better than me. We did system administration. The years went by and I continued to expand my programming skills. I went from job to job, always up into a better situation. He stayed at the same place, doing system administration. One time I tried to recruit him to work at my company. He said something that he'd said several times before: "You've always been better than me at marketing yourself." Over the years I have looked back and realized that he was less of a friend to me than I was to him. He played some political games against me with the boss, I now realize, and he also fed the peer group's doubts about me. Every now and then we run into him in public and he insists that we trade email addresses. He never sends me an email, and never replies to my email. I suspect that he's still a better programmer than I am, but I am proud of how far I've come. The last time we ran into him, he again suggested we trade email addresses. Mindful that he doesn't really mean it, I ignored it while the conversation went elsewhere. Then he used one of the crayons the kids were drawing with to write his email address on a napkin. I wrote him and he never replied. Every now and then I think of mailing him a real letter or an email that says: "I'm not just better at marketing myself."

Last night I asked my son, "What is three plus the square of two?" He thought for a while and said "Four." I said, "Well, that's the last part, but I asked you what three plus the square of two is." He said, "Oh! Seven." This morning I asked him, "What is 10 plus the square of three?" He said "Nineteen." Then I asked him, "What is two squared plus three squared?" He thought for 10 seconds and said "Thirteen." He's not quite six yet.

It's been awhile since my last update of quasi-scientific metrics. So here are today's results...

Left grip is 26 pounds (22, 22, 26), right grip is 74 pounds (72, 74, 67), left leg balance is 6.75 seconds, and inhale volume is 4200 mL.