Tools

I think my brain was a little fried at work today, but I was staring at my Internet Explorer browser, and noticed for the first time that one of the menus was called "Tools".

Well I mean, I always knew there was the "Tools" menu, but for the first time it amused me. I imagined clicking on the menu, and it opening up a list of names of people who are tools. Maybe it would look something like:

Job Fair Stuff

Don't really have a point to this entry, but I noticed that I still have a lot of the stuff I got at those college job fairs we used to go to.

I've got a deck of playing cards from Motorola, a bunch of t-shirts from Compaq and AMD, and a whole bunch of pens or highlighters from small companies I don't even remember talking to.

Raytheon gave me this cool little digital (as in electronic) clock/calendar thing, while Honda gave me a stopwatch, which I actually still use. Kinda impressive that these electronic things still work, 6 years later.

I wonder what happened to those little rubber balls that flash when you bounce them though, those were the coolest.

More Joe Chens

One of my earliest entries ever posted on this blog was about my name, and how it's way too common. I talked about the problems I had in getting a email account with my name (without having to add a whole bunch of numbers after it), or when I was at school in Taiwan and another guy named Joe Chen had the locker above mine.

Well, it seems this issue has even followed me to my current job. It doesn't happen too often, but every once in a while, I get an email at work that was intended for one of the TWO other Joe Chen's at this company. I guess it should only be expected that in a corporation that includes over 100,000 employees, my name wouldn't be unique. Fortunately, both of the other Joes are at a different location than mine, somewhere out in California.

So anyways, I got one of Cali Joe Chen's emails when I got into work this morning, and forwarded it to him. He replied later to say thanks, and I noticed that the timestamp between my email and his reply was almost exactly 2 hours apart.

It got me wondering about this other Joe Chen. We obviously already share the same name and employer, what about the rest of his life? Is his daily routine exactly like mine, except 2 time zones away? Like I get to work at 8 am every day, then check my email, look at Yahoo Chicagoland weather for kicks, and read the Chicago Sun Times for news on the White Sox, etc.

2 hours later, when it's 10 am here and 8 am on the West Coast, does Cali Joe Chen get to work and do the same thing that I did 2 hours earlier? Check his email, look up Yahoo weather for Orange County, read the LA Times coverage of the Dodgers or whatever?

What about around the world? There must be thousands of Joe Chens between China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, etc. Is there a Joe Chen who wakes up in Taipei 13 hours after I do, goes to work, and reads the Taipei Times about the Brother Elephants (the most popular team in Taiwan's pro baseball league)? Can it be said that "the sun never sets on Joe Chen"?

See, these are the questions that confound a man when his name is so common. If you have a unique name, consider yourself lucky. I already promised to myself that when I have kids, I'm naming them something like Zoltan-59C or Seven. Seven Chen, haha I kinda like that. Actually maybe it should be more like Twenty-four Chen, I guess, since Joe Crede is like the Mickey Mantle of my day.

Although, there is one good thing about having a generic name like mine. I don't have to worry about masking or redacting (that's my new word now, thanks to the HGH investigations) my own name in this blog. You try to search for "Joe Chen" on the internet, and you'll have to go through page after page of fobby grad students before you reach my page (if at all). My name has made me practically "unGoogleable".

I Heart Joe Crede

(It's For The Kids)

I read this article today about how there's a new ringtone out there that can be heard by kids only, and not adults:

Students find ringtone adults can't hear

I didn't know that was even possible, but apparently it is, if you set the frequency at the right range. Kinda like those "dog whistles" I guess.

The news is alarming to me, though, because I didn't think there was that much difference between an adult's hearing and a child's hearing. It's not like with dogs and humans, this is human to human we're talking about, just different ages.

I know my hearing will go eventually, but I always thought your hearing didn't start degrading until you were elderly (like 60's or so), and by then, you probably have other things to worry about. But it doesn't "sound" (har har) like they are talking about grandmas and grandpas who need hearing aids. The article distinguishes between "5th graders" or "teenagers" and "adults", and if anything, I'm thinking that I fall into the "adults" category.

That's not cool. I guess my body is breaking down even faster than I thought it would. Next thing you know I'll be wearing sweaters in the middle of August and smelling like mothballs. Umm, let's hope not.

By the way, my favorite sentence from the article:

"As people age, many develop what's known as aging ear..."

Hmmmm... FASCINATING