First impressions can be quite off. Tough-looking, bad-ass genius turns out to be a really nice and considerate person. Feeling sorry for me when I was working on my woefully small laptop, he offered me the use of a much nicer loaner. I didn’t take it. I haven’t been fully initiated to linux yet. Sorry, but I did very much appreciate the sentiment. Maybe after I learn more from friendly, pro-linux, sitcom-perfect genius I will be ready to take that step. I didn’t want to break anything so soon after starting my new job.

As it turns out, I was breaking lots of things already–namely rules.

I should have guessed as much from that sly smile on friendly, pro-linux, sitcom-perfect genius’s face as he reminded me about the HR orientation for new hires. There we got to learn all sorts of things like how we should refrain from commenting about people’s bodies. After all, one person may intend to compliment another, but the other person may be so insulted they will never be able to work together again. I can see how that could happen. Ooops… apologies to quirky, artistic genius with great hair I didn’t mean any offense when I added the ‘great hair’ detail. Actually, I should probably apologize to the whole team for compacting all that genius and personality down into such short descriptors.
Well, they’re only first impressions, so please bear with me till I learn more. Now before we leave behind the topic of great hair completely, I encourage everyone with great hair to grow it out and donate it.

Oh, I almost forgot. In addition to being surrounded by geniuses, I also work with a few wizards:

Thank goodness I only broke the rule about commenting about verbal accents in my head. I love accents. I love the flavor that accents add to a conversation. I love the subtle shifts in tone, stress, and rhythm. It was lovely hearing how differently people spoke in New Orleans.

Whenever I hear accents, I think about sensory perception and how the phonemes we learn as a part of our native language affects our ability to perceive phonemes from other languages. It also reminds me of MC Lars and his absolutely brilliant take on the ‘mechanics of rap’. I’ll end this post since I’m already digressing so much.