everyone has their story.

I've spent an abnormal amount of time at the Apple Store this past six weeks or so, dealing with both my personal and work laptops. The personal machine needed a new battery, which in modern MacBooks is a single piece with the keyboard and trackpad; this was actually pretty awesome because four years of constant use left both the keyboard and trackpad pretty beat up. The work laptop is limping along, and I can use it, but I've warned IT I will probably end up begging them for a less haunted machine.

The guy who helped me with the haunted work laptop, though. Nice guy, in his 20s, who besides working at the Apple Store, is not just in a band, he's a drummer, and has done some sound engineering.

(I'm sometimes not good at not having conversations, and I opened this up by being startled when the idiots running the sound system dropped the microphone a few times with the volume about double what it should have been, in a space that is fundamentally a 2-story tall empty concrete box. I mentioned compressors and limiters and we were off to the races.)

He loves model trains, and he's far and away the youngest officer of his model train club (association? I don't remember) in many, many decades.

He makes and sells various train parts, using a 3-D printer. He'd like to build a business around it, but needs to buy injection molds, which are expensive.

His uncle knows a Japanese angel investor who loves model trains, and might be excited to provide the capital. If I were that investor, I would be very, very happy for the all-too-rare opportunities to kickstart model-train-related startups.

I live in a very strange place.

true story.

Once when I worked in Palo Alto, a bunch of us were walking back from afternoon coffee. One of the schools would get out around that time, and our office's street is also a bike thoroughfare, so you'd see teenagers of all ages biking to and from school or other places.

I was wearing my (now-deceased) t-shirt with the capsaicin molecule: the primary chemical that makes peppers spicy. The t-shirt doesn't say what the molecule is. It's just the diagram.

We're walking along, and a few kids are riding towards us on the sidewalk. They turned off before they got to us, but as the second kid rode off the curb, he said:

"Hey, look! Capsaicin!"