Another moment of geeking out, to highlight how important small differences in wording can be.
About an hour ago, a coworker of mine has said she was unable to “get on the Internet.” Everyone else had fine connectivity, and she is able to open network documents (meaning she can connect to the office server) so I figured the problem would quickly resolve itself. Just now, thought, she said she still couldn’t “get on to the Internet.”
That seemed odd to me, so I went to her computer and attempted to open Firefox. It wouldn’t open. I opened the Process Explorer and saw that there were about a dozen instances of firefox.exe, and clearly none of them were opening. I force-exited them all, and was then able to open Firefox just fine.
Because my coworker had said she couldn’t “get on the Internet” rather than couldn’t “open Firefox,” I had a completely different (and incorrect) understanding of what her problem was. I’m definitely not blaming her – I don’t know the proper language to refer to problems with my car – just highlighting a minor miscommunication.
Excuse me while I’m a giant sci-fi and lit geek in this meandering post. If you’re not interested in any of the subjects in the title of this post, you may as well skip ’till tomorrow. Or, add some titles to this list of books you like to read and reread as a fun escape: now that I’m done with Heinlein (for the time being) I’ll need something else to get started on.
I’m a big fan of Robert Heinlein. I readily admit he had problems creating really nuanced female characters, and many of his male characters – particularly in his later books – are huge Marty Stus. Yet, for all that, I love the stories he created. He had an expert sense of dramatic timing, created worlds and universes that were exciting and dynamic, and (most importantly) wrote books that are fun to read. And reread.
On top of that, as a teenager first reading Heinlein, I loved the ideas he put forth about personal autonomy and individual freedom. As I’ve grown older, I think his vision of capitalism, of hard work equaling success, is a bit naive, but he does an excellent job of making it attractive. Of making the reader believe that, sure, if everyone tried their hardest and respected their fellow man (and in Heinlein, it usually is their fellow man) the world would turn out alright. And I still feel very shaped by Heinlein when it comes to my own optimism about the possibilities open to humanity: space travel, medical technology, and more.
More than that, though, Heinlein created a universe to which I love to return, again and again.
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