I say "Ummm..." a lot.  I mentioned this to Karla and she says it's a CPU word.  "It means you're assembling data in your head - spooling."
I also say the word "like" too much, and Karla said there was no useful explanation for people saying this word.  Her best guess was saying that "like" is the unused 97 percent of your brain trying to make its presence known.  Not too flattering.
I think I'm going to try and do mental Find-and-Replace on myself to eliminate these two pesky words altogether.  I'm trying to debug myself.

Random moment: This afternoon I was in the McDonald's in El Camino Real near Calfornia Street and they had this Lucite box with a slot on top where people put their business cards.  It was stuffed with cards.  Really stuffed.
But the weird thing was, I couldn't locate anything on the box saying what the cards would be used for.  So I guess it's just human instinct to stick your business card in a slot.  Like you're going to win... what - a free orange drink machine for your birthday party?  I saw a woman's card from Hewlett-Packard and a card from some guy in Mexico saying "Graduate from Stanford Graduate School of Business."  Here's this Stanford graduate at McDonald's putting his card in a box at random.  I just don't understand people sometimes.  Didn't he learn anything at Stanford?

Many geeks don't really have a sexuality - they just have work.  I think the sequence is that they get jobs at Microsoft or wherever right out of school, and they're so excited to have this "real" job and money that they just figure that the relationships will naturally happen, but then they wake up and they're thirty and they haven't had sex in eight years.  There are always these flings at conferences and trade shows, and everyone brags about them, but nothing seems to emerge from them and life goes back to the primary relationship: Geek and Machine.
It's like male geeks don't know how to deal with real live women, so they just assume it's a user inerface problem.  Not their fault.  They'll just wait for the next version to come out - something more "user friendly".

"We look at a flock of birds and we thing one bird is the same as any other bird - a bird unit.  But a bird looks at thousands of people, at a Giants game up at Candlestick Park, say, and all that they see is 'people units.'  We're all as identical to them as they are to us.  So what makes you different from me?  Him from you? Them from her?  What makes any one people any different from any other?  Where does your individuality end and your species-hood begin?  As always, it's a big question on my mind.  You have to remember that most of us who've moved to Silicon Valley, we don't have the traditional identity-donating structures like other places in the world have: religion, politics, cohesive family structure, roots, a sense of history or other prescribed belief systems that take the onus off individuals having to figure out who they are.  You're on your own here.  It's a big task, but just look at the flood of ideas that emerges from the plastic!"
 
 

loads and loads and loads of stuff