Welcome to the Lounge

I write in this staccato, <br />
bastardized XML style, <br />
because a kazillion<br />
mugs of Starbucks <br />
and decades of conversing <br />
mainly with computers, fused this style <br />
into my neural pathways.<br />
I can hardly communicate <br />
properly with humans nowadays.<br />
Maybe you think to shoot me<br />
is the only merciful thing to do?<br />
You will have to wait in line with your gun. <br />
And it is a very long line.

		Like all good people, I always blame <br />
		external factors for my character <br />
		flaws and shortcomings, specifically:<br />
			(a) Society<br />
			(b) Microsoft.<br />
<br />
		Society: For creating a high tech environment <br />
		where the techno-nerds are king, and where <br />
		the high school jocks who had all the <br />
		pretty girls chasing after them,<br />
		inexorably fade <br />
		into the grey nothingness of mediocrity.<br />
		Society is to blame because it forced me <br />
		to compensate for my lack of jockiness <br />
		by focusing on my only talent: <br />
		A modest grasp of science.<br />
		I ended up talking mainly to computers, <br />
		and not humans, for decades. <br />
<br />
		Microsoft I blame for perpetuating this terse, <br />
		staccato coding style for communicating with computers. <br />
		First there was MS Assembler, then plain old C, <br />
		then C++, then the visual versions, <br />
		ending with C# (for the moment). <br />
		Having communicated this way <br />
		for almost 100,000 hours over more than 4 decades, <br />
		I can no longer break this habit.<br />
		(I just had to blame Microsoft for something - anything - <br />
		it is the American Way.)