I have never agreed with anything..

..quite as much as I agree with this.

Geek syndrome

I understand that this is true for a lot of geeks such as myself, and doesn’t necessarily indicate anything truly pathological, but I score alarmingly high on the Baron-Cohen Autism-Spectrum Quotient test - a 41 to be exact, where 32 or higher is supposed to make you at least a candidate for an Asperger’s diagnosis. Of course, if you know anything at all about autism spectrum disorders, it’s pretty easy to see how the questions will be scored even as you’re answering them, and I may have self-selected this result to some extent. But I really did try to be accurate and honest in my responses. I’m not claiming to be an Asperger’s case, but it is a pretty telling result. I do believe I would benefit from being aware that I have certain profound deficits in understanding social situations and interactions, not as an excuse for poor behavior, but so that I may better learn to adjust and compensate for that.

Don’t shoot the puppy

Step away from the Flash game.

Miracles of modern science

Microwavable grilled cheese! They sell this from a vending machine, not in my office, but downstairs in the building where we’re located. It will come as no surprise when I tell you that it bears only the most passing resemblance to actual grilled cheese, but (much like instant coffee) it might be almost acceptable if considered strictly in its own right, without comparison to the genuine article it imitates.

I’m pretty sure it’s mostly butter.

News of a personal nature

So okay for some reason I’m like shy or something about blogging this sort of thing, but for anyone who reads this and hasn’t heard already, my wife and I are expecting our first child in August. The 20-week ultrasound was this morning, and we found out that we are having a girl!

Sure, I suppose I’m anxious about the whole parental responsiblity dealio somewhere in there, but at the moment I’m just walking around mentally rehearsing sentences that begin with “my daughter” with a silly grin on my face.

They gave us some printouts of images from the ultrasound. I will try to get something scanned and uploaded here as soon as I can.

All right then..

..I suppose I should either go ahead and change the name of this blog to “Ow My Knee Hurts” or else find something else to write about. The thing is, when your knee hurts this much, it commands a lot of your attention.

It’s my own fault. With the knee injury I just got over, I was really careful (at least after awhile) about cutting back on both my running distance and speed. After several weeks of running no more than three miles at a time, at a nice easy pace, the knee felt perfectly healed, but I was getting increasingly impatient about not running faster and farther. The rest of my body was definitely wanting more of a workout. For about a week or so after the knee had improved, I experimented carefully with adding distance and speed. I did a four- and then a five-mile run, and generally increased my pace to 10 min/mile (or a little faster on three milers). The knee felt all right through all of this.

So then but anyway, since everything seemed to be feeling so good, last Thursday afternoon I decided to see just how close I could come to hitting my current medium-term goal of finishing six miles in an hour or less. I managed to run the six in 62 minutes. This was an exciting result, nearly to my goal and more than 10 minutes off my previous best over that distance. But I seem to have injured my knee in a new and completely different way in the process. It’s nothing tragic, just some irritating soreness, but I’m back to cross training and regular doses of ibuprofen for the foreseeable future.

I think like a lot of people I tend to hurt myself in this way because I’m not used to what it feels like to give yourself an overuse injury. I’m not a masochist at all, and I know enough to stop if something really starts hurting abruptly. But this knee stuff never seems to hurt has much while I’m running as it does a little while afterwards. Even though I’m limping around today just trying to walk around the office, I bet if I could go push myself through a mile on the track right now, then I could probably run a couple more miles relatively pain-free. Not that I’m going to go try this, of course. I’m really just writing this as a reminder to myself to take it easy, and more importantly to continue to pace myself, even after the knee feels better again. Which I have no doubt it will if I take care of it.

Attention: intarweb humor alert!

Nothing on the web has made me actually laugh out loud in my cubicle at work in quite awhile, but this finally did it: CHEESE CHICKEN, a game to play at the Olive Garden. HOSPITALIANO! (via Spatch)

Hey

My knee doesn’t hurt anymore when I run. It’s pretty amazing.

Just wanted to mention

Even now that I’m pushing 40, I find that just trying to stay committed to a standard of behavior that—far from being perfect or kind or even remotely rational—but that is simply as free as possible from self-deception and tired adolescent bullshit, is actually a pretty tall order. For example, calling my blog Moody Narcissist, even ironically (hell, especially the irony) is basically the act of a 17-year-old.

Oh well, I’ll keep working at it.

Oh yeah, I have a blog

Sorry, I forgot all about this thing. I’ve been pretty busy. Right now I’m still pretty worn out. I’ll be posting more, um, soonish.

Traitors amongst the fungi

From Discovery Channel News: Fungus Yields Fungicide

It’s a madcap world.

I knew it!

Sucking is good for you!

(Link is work-safe, unless your work has a problem with brightly-colored Flash interfaces, or something against lollipops. I got there today, by the way, because someone at work gave me a “Chupa Chups” lollipop, which I must heartily endorse as one of the tastier candies I have enjoyed.)