livejournal: [name]’s birthday is coming up!

• who?
• oh, it’s [name2], they changed their lj name some time in the past 15 years
• no hold on, let’s work out who it is from their friends list
• erm ok, let’s see if we can work it out from their icons
• oh, it’s actually [name3]
• ok, when did they last post ... 2008
• let’s look them up on facebook
• argh don’t remember their tax name
• when did i last post anything to lj/dreamwidth
• (finds tumblr effortpost to repurpose as dreamwidth post, which automatically crossposts to livejournal)
• (reloads tumblr dash)

engineering while brown

ahmed mohamed seems to be hitting the way cool points, which is great.

(neither of us are brown, though arkady's sister is muslim. that counts, right?)

i remember when i brought electronics to school when i was 12. i worried people would think the electronic things were girly. this was an actual worry i had in my head.

(everyone ended up thinking it was way cool and i got some of the other guys into electronics too. this was 1979, back when dick smith was run by dick smith.)

arkady did this as well at age 13, but the school was worried a’s electronics would blow up. this is because a designed them as part of something intended to blow up: a timing circuit for detonating nitroglycerin. a had previously made nitroglycerin, at school at age 12 1/2, after watching a TV show about how to make nitroglycerin as a step to making dynamite, which was the aim at the time. the chem lab had nitric acid, so a made nitroglycerin. took 4kg of fuller’s earth to make it into dynamite to school! a made the nitroglycerin. teacher worked out what a had made, and called the bomb disposal squad to dispose of the, er, two pints of nitroglycerin a had made in the school chemistry lab. the nitroglycerin was taken out to the playing field and the school got a new long jump pit. a didn’t realise till later (a) just how much trouble they’d caused the school (b) that they were quite possibly personally responsible for uk school kids not having access to actual nitric acid.

i assume nobody wonders why i married this person.