Airstrikes like casual sex.

I’ve been in the danger zone of a Hellfire missile strike. Real missile, training mission. We were too close due to bad planning on someone’s part.

I can tell you, it didn’t feel like casual sex.

I think of all the UI “innovations” of late, the ubiquitous and not-very-tasty hamburger menu button is the one I loathe the most.

Fine, use it on a cell phone UI where the screen is tiny and space is at a premium.

But get it the hell off of my desktop machine.

I have all that space on my 30” monitor for a reason – to have the best blend of chrome and UI affordances that I can.

Not everything needs to be crammed into one menu. Not every button needs to be combined with another button.

In most programs these days it takes me 5-10 clicks to be able to do what I formerly could achieve in one or two.

Just unacceptable.

As a kid, I read everything I could get my hands on.

There was nothing I wouldn’t read. Truly. I’d read medical diagnostics manuals. Airline flight manuals. Lists of obscure facts. Dictionaries. You name it, I’d read it. I once read an entire book that pharmacists use to determine drug interactions.

So one day my teacher was discussing crack cocaine and how we shouldn’t do it. She mentioned something about how  — repeating the urban myth – that crack was more dangerous due to how it was made.

She asked rhetorically (it turns out) if anyone knew how crack was made.

I didn’t take it as a rhetorical question. I answered it accurately because I’d read it in some magazine in the library a few weeks before.

I was nine years old.

Parents were called, parent-teacher conferences were set up and all sorts of other rigmarole. Eventually it was acceded to that I was not manufacturing crack cocaine behind the school in my spare time.

This sort of thing was not an abnormal occurrence. I was constantly in trouble for “having knowledge that I shouldn’t have.”

I got in more trouble more often for this sort of thing than for fighting – and I got in fights nearly every day.

It didn’t make me want to stop learning, but it did make me completely ignore anything that was happening in school.

In a way it was a gift, though a gift with consequences. It means I don’t get as much credit for the knowledge I do possess because I don’t have the right set of papers (aka credentials) to go with the erudition.

But such is life.