The pattern had bewildered me. Its hair was strangely dented at random times and felt crinkled. One day, it felt compelled to expose its secretive habit, and I immediately felt remorse and affection for this characteristic hermit.
About two mornings ago, we had a candid moment while we were lazily reading the headlines in bed. I subscribe to the L.A. Times world news and Randall, to the subreddit, Awww. I was silently lamenting over the Syrian conflict and how their government may resort to using alleged chemical weapons on their own people… while Randall clamors over and exclaims an offbeat remark about this cute wittle puppy. He usually shows me a cute fuzzy wuzzy link every other morning, and I’ve come to realize that he reads these things first everyday! I have yet to catch up to his developer lifestyle. He is a dependent consumer as much as he is a faithful loyalist to his beloved Reddit and Hackernews communities– so much that if I ever use them, he finds it attractive. Nerd alert.
I rarely take Randall shopping with me when I shop for myself. He usually dies inside while feigning contentment. It kills me to see him so unhappy. He recalled this pretty nerdy anecdote when we did happen to go shopping together for the holidays and had passed by an office supply store. Yup, he actually said “the cool guys” did this. I just hope they had something to eat for lunch since they weren’t spending their money on a meal. There are more interesting comics to come of other times I take Randall into the real world on shopping trips where he does and says weird things.
Well, I wouldn’t call it a discussion actually. But this is an example of our daily coexisting. Sometimes it would be nice if Randall was a girl, or just almost normal. I know he wishes I was a gifted developer like him (Right now, I joke that I’m pretty good at concatenating strings and creating directories in Python). As different as we are, we find each other entertaining and intriguing. It definitely keeps things new. I get to learn about tech galore while he learns things from me, like what’s going on outside or offline. Today, I showed him how to cook chicken in the oven! I think I’ll have to spend today studying up on how exactly memcached works because I just don’t grasp the definition yet unfortunately.
Dating a developer can be lonely if you’re not a developer yourself. You may notice that there are definitely less people around, few social outings and lots of solitude and indoor time. Well, developers are not always antisocial; they just socialize online with selective humans and bots. I finally got to meet my honey’s friends online through a mystery called IRC. I was immediately lectured for referring to Randall as Randall since he preferred his alias or handle at the time (which was in leet speak!). His friends only knew his identity by his handle so I just confused everyone. I felt really bad, like I made a embarrassing impression. 
I’m glad everything worked out though. You learn something new everyday when you date a developer!
This post is dedicated to my sweet little cousin who is like a little sister to me. She was asked out by the boy she likes and she said yes! It reminded me of when Randall and I started dating about seven years ago. He would interrogate me with unusual questions like this one, “Are you a Black Hat or a White Hat?” (You can see why I found him very interesting.) Randall taught me that there are different kinds of hackers, such as black hats and white hats. Black hats hack to exploit for malicious intentions while white hats exploit to test or improve code. The good thing is doing either could get you a job after serving some jailtime. 😀
Just two kinds of hackers. Excerpt from Wikipedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_hat_hacking#Black_hat
Congrats Cisa. Here’s to all the new experiences and feelings that a new relationship can bring! We’ll be black hats together if anything goes wrong!
Tonight my honey spent the rest of his holiday weekend cleaning out his Dropbox (cloud drive). I spent the day cooking two pies and then cleaning up the mess just as Randall declared how great it was to finally sort through like years of files and pictures online. I thought it was funny and a bit nerdy that even his “winter cleaning” is virtual. It is comforting to know he’s been using Dropbox (and Google Drive) for a long time now since free cloudsharing is so awesome!. Unfortunately, not everyone uses it yet. I’ve spent some time answering questions from curious friends and family about cloudsharing; sometimes being the wife of a developer makes you a sort of tech support or advisor. Well, I recommend you try the cloud! It is safe and private, so far, and free!
If you get overexcited about holidays like me, you might make pilgrim and Native American seating place cards with specially generated names on them for everyone at your table! It’s almost fun for everyone until someone points out the flaws in the application. I ended up using a better pilgrim-name generator online that Randall is sure to approve of.
My husband is not used to using pencils and paper; perhaps most developers are this way. Most writing is illegible and occasionally, there are symbols or binary. In our love notes from high school, he would jot down code and it bewildered me. Now he writes hearts in all of the cards he gives me. They are written as if he typed them with a keyboard and had to resort to <3. He’s like a computer or a little WallE. At least I understand what the hearts mean!
Who says that? Randall does. He hates being tickled–even if he laughs while he’s being tickled. He doesn’t fight back though; he just yells reasons to stop. I guess, as a developer, he is accustomed to using his mind instead of his body to solve problems, so he doesn’t physically stop me from tickling him.
Programmers often assume you’re telling them to get MORE caffeine when you’re trying to tell them that they have had enough.
Hardly Funny 