Midweek Recap

Wednesday, February 6, 2008. 2332. Back in the apartment in Virginia. Dark, but I'm guessing it is surprisingly warm outside, as it was the entirety of today.

I got to listen to 107.5, The River, while en route to the client site. One morning, they went absolutely nuts that someone cursed on the air, which finally justified their time-delay airing. On and on they bragged about having to use the bleeper, and this was only the second time in ten years they'd been given the chance to do so. Twice in ten years. In the D.C. metro area, we're lucky it's not more frequent than twice an hour that someone gets bleeped.

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The struggle for a project name continues. Since it incorporates Queues, several client employees refer to the project as the "Queue Thang." Not "Queue Thing," "Queue Thang." This may stick, but boy, I hope it don't. Have you heard me affect a southern accent? It not pretty.

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I'd always considered myself fairly easy to comprehend, accent-wise. Yes, this despite most peoples' inability to comprehend me because I mumble, talk really fast, and use language on occasion which was a better fit for the sixteenth century (but I'm getting better on that last one, I swear). Then, I get down to Tennessee.

There's just something about my Yankee accent that was off-putting. At the same time, I think I mentioned it before, I couldn't understand their Southern drawl unless I was looking directly at them and concentrating. It's basically all the same, and apparently, it's not at all the same. I wonder what this says about our brains and our pattern recognition? A big part of language is just pattern recognition, hearing what someone said before, linking it up to a meaning. It's also why language falls apart when I talk to little kids and animals. They don't understand what the hell I'm saying at some times. The patterns are unfamiliar.

Despite my horrendous ability to adopt an accent, I had toyed with trying to make myself more a southerner. Given that most people took me for Hispanic, wouldn't a Spanish accent have been more appropriate? Damned if I know. Still, perhaps there's a need to watch more reruns of Hee-Haw before I take this on.

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For the women out there: During one meeting, we were talking with a vendor. T.K., a woman, and J.M., another woman, and the vendor representative, discussed about ninety percent of all the relevant issues, while the rest of us (men) sat there like lumps on a log, with nothing relevant to add. Boy, the world has changed.

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For the developers out there: I hate virtual machines. Instability, thy name is VMWare. Great in theory, questionable in practice. Granted, it might just be about my level of familiarity with technology. If I didn't read all the time, books would probably scare and confuse me in much the same manner. There are so many of them, and all of them so different, but they're useful somehow?

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So tired.