Look, Ma, no...

[jay]

On the way to National Airport this morning, I was (typically) running a half-hour late. Then became mired in slow-moving traffic on I-66E. My weekly vehicle health management telecon with a large aerospace company was rapidly approaching, so I found myself booting my Mac G4 laptop, unzipping a file, and reading the contact number and password out -- all while still driving. =:-}

Then I joined the conference call via cellphone, while still driving. Sigh.

Otherwise, I had a lovely afternoon with Nancy in Minneapolis, picking up Land's End items in their outlet store for $6-8 each. patgreene is getting a new top and pants for $12 that lists in their catalog for $116.

After a bit of cuddling, we went to dinner and to Augsburg College -- Nancy belongs to an ice-dance club that meets there every Thursday. It's a graceful-but-strenuous sport... and males are much in demand as the female skaters outnumber them 2x-3x (contemplative look)...

I'm back home now.

Comments

[ag-unicorn.livejournal.com]

Not the only one...

I've been contemplating posting something along the lines of, "Could you nice people have at least welcomed him home before whackin' his monkey about the multitasking-while-driving?"; I'd also contemplated just keeping my trap shut.

Seems I opted to do the former.

By the way: welcome home...hope the trip was successful for you.

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

We were all so gob-smacked, that the getting home bit got lost in the panic?

'Multi-tasking whilst driving' is a very carefully neutral way of describing it. You have to multiply the raw odds of something bad happening by the magnitude of the bad, to understand what a gamble it is (c.f. risk management, and how to compare the badness of common things like tripping over, with extremely rare things like asteroid impacts).

Everyone who commented is saying very loudly and clearly how really, really glad they are that our friend made it home with no bad stuff happening - it's just implicit, not explicit.

[ag-unicorn.livejournal.com]

Everyone who commented is saying very loudly and clearly how really, really glad they are that our friend made it home with no bad stuff happening - it's just implicit, not explicit.

Odd...it sounded a lot more like everyone was being critical of Brian for taking a risk. But then, that's probably just my interpretation of what every single person (with the notable exception of p3aches) specifically typed in response to Brian's post, right?

Wonder how Brian saw it...as "welcome home" or "you stupid imbecile"? Or perhaps "welcome home, you stupid imbecile"?

[brian1789.livejournal.com]

I really didn't expect quite the horrified reaction... more of a "that was silly" and nothing more. I was vaguely amused at the time, but it didn't seem significantly riskier than my normally-aggressive driving style at home, without laptop or phone.

Thanks for the welcome, in any case.

[purpletigron.livejournal.com]

Criticism and care go together - if you don't care, why bother to criticise? It is rather too easy to forget to actually say, and clearly show, that you are criticising because you care, it is true. This can come across as a flaming - that you care about the issue, not the person. But I don't think that anyone here was flaming our host, in that they all definitely care about the person in particular as well as the issue.

I'm also sure that everyone here is perfectly capable of distinguishing between an act, and a personality - anyone can commit a 'stupid' act, but pointing that out is very different from reaching a decision that they are a stupid person.