Ca. 20 years ago, at lunchtime all the students in my elementary school were summoned to the school doctor. The adults were panicking about some Soviet power plant and we were forbidden to leave school. But who cares… so I went to my grandma to eat something. My grandma was also kind of panicky, so she ordered me (now satiated) back to school, where I got my share of the Lugol’s Solution. The following summer, the sorrel grew really gigantic, and looked delicious. There was also an abundance of beautiful mushrooms that nobody dared to eat…

And now, 20 years after the Chernobyl meltdown, I learnt that here in Bavaria they have even seen no reason to keep children from playing outside! In Poland half the population was administered Lugol’s Solution. This difference in approach is kind of strange. It’s just ca. 400 kilometers…

As we lived in Munich, I used to get upset about people taking our disabled parking spaces. But Nurembergers are so much more creative! And it is also much more common. here. There is some kind of an endemic belief here, that it’s easier to get away parking for free in the disabled space, than by not paying for the regular one. I suppose the rule is “I am retarded, officer, that’s a severe disability isn’t it?”, as sheer arrogance is too common a trait, to be considered a disability.

A side-note: The German rules are strict - to get a disabled parking ID, one has to have a “severe walking impairment” (Außergewöhnliche Gehbehinderung), not just any disability. It took us ca. half a year to get one, so it’s no picnic.

Anyway, here’s the 7 habits of a Nuremberger asshole:

1. Leave some living aggresive species in the car - usually a husband
2. Blink emergency lights, your car had a break down, of course…
3. Combo: 1. and 2. - the living being in the car starts blinking the lights, as soon as it sees a person in a wheelchair. You just had a sudden break down. Cunning!
4. Leave a huge A4 form,stating something (disability?), behind the windshield. Ah! A nice formal touch…
5. Leave a disabled ID (stating whatever disability, just not a disabled parking ID) behind the windshield. This is on account of future health deterioration, that’s why it is popular among elderly pessimists (moderate pessimists).
6. Use the disabled space as loading/unloading bay. Most common with all kinds of delivery companies - in addition to 2. you leave the trunk open, and voila!
7. Have someone else’s disabled parking ID. I have seen a guy, who limped for the first 50 meters, and got miraculously healed behind the corner. Hallelujah!

Any less common methods?

I habitually operate the mouse with either hand, ie. I switch from one side to the other. This is especially useful, when doing a lot of clicking, eg. during extended periods of mundane cut & pastes, like putting together release notes for the product. This way, I can evenly balance the wear & tear of my wrists. For quite some time, I just used a second mousepad, basically as a placeholder, so that there’s no mess piling, where the mouse belongs both sides of the keyboard. Now I got myself a second mouse!

Happy as I am with such a setup, I must say, that XP is rather limiting here. All the options are single (the control panel icon is “mouse”, not “mice”, so that’s not surprising) - no separate speed, precision, double-click and wheel settings (this one sucks, would be nice to have an additional set of controls). Still, there’s some logic behind this, such an asymmetry could be perplexing. But if things should be kept symmetric, what is the reason for assuming that one has either two right and two left hands (button settings)?

I’m just getting used to the notion of having two mice, but there’s quite a potential here - games that support two mice, just like the consoles have double joysticks, a cheap alternative to one-handed (why one-handed?) 3D controllers, or just being able to “juggle” things on the desktop? An article I read recently (have to search for it), sidenoted on how the idea of a real desktop was developed into the computer desktop paradigm, where the use of two hands was replaced by one-handed point-and-click actions. I sense that the two mouse setup could really redefine the future of the desktop!