Open source vs. Open wife

[Jared Smith]

Develop an ability to allegorize extemporaneously. Monty Harder has the
skill. Ask him a question about Linux and he starts talking about
socket wrenches, baseballs, record players, fenceposts, and wall clocks, 
ordinary things, but underneath is a lesson in some aspect of the 
command line.

My wife recently asked me about how in the world zeros and ones
could carry all the information. I began the very long conversation by
saying "First thing you need to know about computers is how 
incredibly unbelievably fast they are..." We were on a roadtrip
together, and I was able to use the paint-marks on the road to analogize 
the storage of binary data in a continuous ribbon. I talked about
the ASCII table without ever mentioning ASCII, and she remembered a
school period where she had learned that table. She said "Is it
really just a translation table?" I said "yes" and she said "that's why
you mentioned how fast computers are."

I eventually asked her how during data transfer the computer tells the 
difference between 101010001 and 101011111 as in, how do you 
separate the zeros? She thought about it for a while and came up 
with two answers, "time" and "little pauses in between every digit." 
I said time synchronization was right, because it was more compact.

She said she waited three years to ask me that question. My wife is
smarter than I am; I just happen to know more about geek stuff.

>I usually just tell her about my interactions with
>other people, and leave it at that.  That is really what she is interested in
>anyway.

This is also quite true. My wife discovers who I am by how I relate to
people outside of her presence.

-Jared

On Fri, 17 Jan 2003 10:37:04 -0600, Phoenician wrote:
>Just out of curiosity, how many have a non-technical SO (significant other)
>who's eyes glaze over when you tell them about your day (if you work with
>PCs),
>your hobby(ies), latest gadget, or some such?  How do you handle it?
>
>I only ask because my fiancé will ask me about my day, what I am tinkering
>with
>or why I am in the basement hooting and hollering like a chimp :> but when I
>tell
>her about it she starts to she starts to fidget.  Things are fine between
>the two
>us but I was curious about other peoples stories.
>
>
>-  Michienne
>
>ps: It's not a good idea to describe any lack of response
>as in terms of pings and packet loss hehehe