Decisions, Decisions

I got feedback from a few friends and readers urging me to report the guy who hit my car last week, even though he did next-to-no damage, and even several days after the fact. I thought about it, and ended up not reporting it. I felt uncomfortable reporting it several days after the fact as it seemed awkward ("Well, officer, I didn't report it at the time because there wasn't really any damage... no, no one else saw what happened as far as I know..."). This is one of my less likeable traits: I don't feel comfortable dealing with official authorities unless I'm pretty sure I know what's going to be involved, and not reporting it for several days made me even less comfortable with it.

(This is a big part of why I've dragged my feet on house-hunting, too. My current fear is that even if I learn what I need to learn, I'm still going to want to rope in a tax consultant and a lawyer to help me with the details, which is a kind of complexity which intimidates me.)

But, next time (if there is a next time, which hopefully there won't be) I'll be armed with this experience and may behave differently.

Speaking of accidents, a friend of mine got into one earlier this week, an unfortunate encounter which I think he feels pretty bad about, although he didn't say so in so many words, and even though it sounds like no one was hurt and the cars involved should be reparable. Combined with my own incident last week (even though there wasn't anything I could have done to avoid it), I've been driving the road a little more carefully recently, keeping more of an eye on what other drivers are doing, and trying to be less aggressive.

This week at work I'm interviewing four candidates for three different positions on two different groups within Apple. It's a lot of work! I think I'm becoming a better interviewer, but it's happening slowly. I'd like to improve my skill at assessing the details of a candidate's technical skills. That's a tough one. It's made me realize that despite my fairly extensive education, I still haven't really analyzed a lot of the details of why I program the way I do, and why I think my design skills are good.

For those comic book readers out there, you couldn't do much better than to pick up the Girl Genius secret blueprints comic that came out this week. It's a background volume for the upcoming fantasy adventure series from Phil and Kaja Foglio, and like everything else Phil does, it looks clever and hilariously funny. Someday I hope Phil will be recognized as one of the great comic book creators of his era.

I also read the first 12 issues of the Marvel superhero series Mutant X. In it, the hero Havok's mind is transported to the body of his deceased doppelgänger on a parallel world where he leads The Six, a team of mutant heroes based on the original X-Men. In this world, heroes and villains' lives have taken very different paths from the way they did in the Marvel world we know. The Beast has become semi-amphibious and lost his brilliance; Storm has become a vampire; Spider-Man has six arms; Magneto leads the X-Men; Havok's brother Cyclops is believed to have died as a child, and so forth.

The book is clever in its permutations of familiar characters, and the art is pretty solid. It doesn't work so well as a story, though; Havok is not a strong personality (and the title "Mutant X" has no meaning whatsoever), and the main storyline running through these issues comes to a loud but disappointing conclusion, illuminating little about what sort of a man Havok is. It's all a big, trippy adventure with lots to explore, which is fun for an old X-Men fan like myself, but is kind of a waste for anyone who isn't into that kind of thing.

I found a pretty good summary of many of the character differences between the Mutant X universe and the "real" Marvel universe.

I think the only other thing to mention is playing Ultimate tonight. Subrata missed playing this week, too, due to work. And we were pretty short on people, so we didn't have many substitutes, which means I spent a lot of time walking since I just don't have the endurance to run for two hours straight.

In fact, my endurance felt a little depressed this week, as I was having trouble kicking myself into overdrive. So I didn't make as many pass plays as I sometimes do. Strangely, I did get in two defensive blocks, and very nearly made a third one (I can't believe he dug it out), and I think my instincts are getting better. So it wasn't an awful evening, but it felt frustrating much of the time!