Today was a day of brain farts. Can anyone guess what happened in this picture? I'll tell you at the end of the post.

First, I will tell you something about me. I haven't mentioned it much, but I am a programmer, and was a mathematician before that. Not a number crunching guy, but a puzzles guy-- The whole manipulating equations and proving theorems, which comes with a pinch of creativity and out-of-the-box thinking. Puzzles, brain teasers, I am a fan of that. Maybe one of these posts I'll talk about what I actually did research on.

But the reason I mention this, is because my wife wonders how someone with "science smarts" could be so dumb. Imagine the movie character that's "smart but aloof". The mathematician in A Beautiful Mind say, or say the OCD detective from Monk, and then dial down the smartness a lot, and add a bit of forgetfulness, a bit more aloof-ness, and maybe less of the schizophrenia.

Crypto Detour

Just today I found that while reviewing my recovery procedure for one of my offline wallets, one of my backups did not have complete information on how to recover the private key. In other words, if I lost my first backup, it would be as if I lost all the backups, and my funds associated with that wallet would be lost forever. It's not that much funds though, so it wouldn't be the end of the world.

And also that sounded smarter than it actually was. I wasn't reviewing my recovery procedure, I was actively trying to move funds from my offline NEO wallet into my Ledger Nano S (hardware wallet). And yes, NEO now has support for Ledger Nano S, and it works great! I need to go check my other backups, and if any of you are crypto folks are securing your own private keys, I would recommend an audit of your recovery mechanisms.

Of course, having moved my funds off to the ledger, it makes it more manageable. At the same time, consolidating funds into one place has its risks as well. Less things to secure, but I better damn well secure it properly.

The Fart

Anyway, what was I saying... Yes the picture. So that is a picture of a container with rice porridge in it, and a wooden spoon that is too large to scoop anything out of it!

My wife was teaching piano today, and I helped pack lunch for her break. We did this last week, and I distinctly remembered having difficulty pouring the porridge into the container, and spilling a lot of it. And at that time, I completely forgot to pack a spoon, and she wasn't so happy about that.

This time, using the wooden spoon, I did not spill any while pouring the porridge into the container. However, I did not realize the spoon would not be useful for taking the contents out to eat and that was a very big brain fart on my part. I may as well not have packed a spoon at all, and she probably thought I was taunting her or something.

This was the ensuing conversation:

Ah the wonder that is my mind. A case where it just simply wasn't thinking, or very focused on a different aspect of the problem at hand. I have some other stories to tell about it, but I will save them for later. I thought this was pretty funny though.