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From Brian Rogers, Software Engineer:

Now comes the time when I write about how I can't think of anything to write about. Or at least nothing to write several hundred words about. So instead, I'll write a little on several disparate and minimally relevant subjects that cross my mind. If you read these letters regularly, you might have realized that this is hardly an original tactic to avoid forming a coherent argument too close to a deadline. Damn procrastinating Gen Xers.

It has rained a lot this year, which makes mountain biking a wet and slippery undertaking. Massachusetts mud stinks. I carry my bike in my car, so I got air fresheners to fight it. Call it kitty litter theory; that's kind of what it smells like.

Rural cops have nothing to do. They pull you over for stupid things. I got pulled over for having my front license plate on the back, and vice versa. I also got pulled over for not having an emissions sticker. Justifiable, maybe, but he didn't just pull me over. He followed me a couple of miles, parallel parked behind me, and then got out and walked up to my window. I drive a '91 Honda in good condition,so how bad could my emissions be, anyway? In both cases, I wasn't doing anything else wrong. I think this town needs fewer bored cops. Or more real crime to fight so they have something better to power trip on then tired bureaucracy.

Eating lunch outside in the sun on Spring Street is nice, but there are entirely too few options.

The Taco Bell Chihuahua is marketing genius. Any company that can successfully use red scare imagery and a hyper active female dog with a male voice to sell bad tex-mex is okay by me. Bless you, Taco Bell.

San Francisco is a nice place to visit, especially when you can get your employer to pay for it. Everything is really expensive there.

Wal-Mart sucks. They have a tropical fish section, but half the fish are dead and stuck to the filter intake. Since there is no algae for the sucker fish to eat, they eat the dead fish. Yum.

For fear of this is getting too dumb-sounding, here is where I try to sound smart. How transparent. One of the great benefits of object-oriented programming is polymorphism. By overriding methods of an abstract super class in different ways in the subclasses, we can call those methods on a reference to an instance of the superclass, and the appropriate inherited method will be called, even though we don't know (and likely don't care) which subclass it is actually an instance of. This is especially neat-o in polymorphic data structures. Duh!

Those gyro-scope things they strap you into and spin you around three different axes at once don't really make you sick because your stomach is near the center of rotation. They do make you dizzy, because your head is no where near the center. Be warned that your shirt will come up if you don't tuck it in.

I like the recent resurrgence of fast, energetic swing music by bands like the Squirrel Nut Zippers and the Cherry Poppin' Daddies. Is this the new alternative?

I saw a performance of "The Glass Menagerie" last night at the Williamstown Theater Festival. It starred Eric Stoltz, and one of Rachel's recent boyfriends on 'Friends.' At the end of the first act, when Laura asks her mother what to wish on the moon for, her mother answers, "Wish for... happiness." At this point an older man in the audience said in a loud tone of voice, "You don't want it!" I thought it was a strange situation for hecklers, but as it turned out, he had one of those headsets for the hearing impaired on, and thought he was whispering to someone. It was funny, but I missed the last line in the act, the kicker that you are supposed to ponder through intermission.

I'm going to be driving cross country on vacation this month. I'm sure I'll have more to write about afterwards, but I guess that will have to wait until next letter.

Bye,
Brian, Software Engineer (7/8/98)

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Read more "Letters from Tripod" in the archive.