My wife is organizing Christmas presents right now. It’s kind of disturbing. Two days after the annual Devouring of the Turkey and the presents are being prepped for dispersal. The really scary thing is that we didn’t even participate in the post-Thanksgiving shopping scrum. This is all stuff that she’s been acquiring for months, hiding it away in nooks and crannies, out of the public view.
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Tagged Personal Blather
I’ve got a strange hunch that today is going to be kind of laid back here at work. It’s the day before Thanksgiving break and the place looks fairly deserted. On the other hand, it’s possible that we’ll be getting a slew of last-minute things in from people who have just now realized that it’s the day before Thanksgiving break and they need something for a talk they’re giving on Monday morning.
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Tagged Personal Blather
I’ve been playing around with a new program: Delicious Library by Delicious Monster. Not only does their company have a really cool name, but the program does some really cool things. Basically, it’s a library management program. It helps you track your books, DVDs, CDs and video games. It’s useful for tracking who has borrowed what and when (which is why we’re looking at it for the expanded office environment). But the really cool thing is how it handles data entry.
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Tagged Reviews
We’re entirely moved out of the old office now. Nothing but dust & cardboard box fluff on the carpet are left to show our five year tenancy. Well, that and the holes in the walls from where the contractors took down our shelving. And the little loops of zip strip that we used to hang the sync cables for the flash system hanging from the ceiling tile tracks. And the odd dust smudge on the wall where the server has spent the last five years accellerating dust particles into the paint.
So yeah. I gues there are a few things left in the old office. But nothing that we’re particuarly going to miss.
Tagged Personal Blather
Well, mostly back. And it’s not like I really went anywhere. I just had a bit of a problem with the laptop. Basically, I had some problems with file corruption that had to be taken care of by reformatting and reinstalling… Yes, it happens to mac users too. But I was able to backup all of my files and I’m going to be restoring them today, so what could have been a horrifying loss of all of my photos and writing is, instead, just a minor inconvenience.
Of course, it’s a minor inconvenience that’s taken two vital days out of my prep time for the U*Con Smithee show, but hey! I can work on that instead of sleeping for the next few days. That’s what caffiene is for, after all!
Tagged Personal Blather
The server burp that was scheduled for Friday night wound up getting re-scheduled for today… Um.. Actually for about two hours ago. The fact that you’re reading this (and that I’m writing it instead of writhing under several hundred pounds of computer equipment while being alternately dissolved and electrified by the leaking batteries of six uninterruptible power supplies) is greatly attributable to the help of Badmovie who thought we were just coming in for a bit of weekend Smithee editing, but who wasn’t adverse to passing me the odd cable and holding the doors while I wheeled the server rack from our old office to the new one.
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Tagged Technical Notes
The office move is becoming a really real reality, and soon. As in we need to be out of our current office by the end of next week. We’ve already got a lot of things moved to our new location, and even more things are boxed up and ready to go, but we’ve (rather predictably) run into a few snags…
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Tagged Personal Blather
On the drive in this morning my wife and I got talking about how confusing word order can be in different languages. It’s a strange situation, as a native English speaker, to get all introspective about how we organize adjectives and nouns. Generally, we stack up the adjectives and point them at the nouns, instead of the other way around. So you don’t find out what you’re talking about until you know what it’s like.
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Tagged Personal Blather
Some work related cool shareware: MacOSaiX is a freeware mosaic builder for Mac OS X. You just specify a start image, a source for thumbnails and let it go to work assembling a big image made from hundreds of tiny images. We’re setting up an image for work using a big photo of the hospital and lots of tiny images of the various docs & support folks.
Tagged Reviews
One of our expatriate southern docs stopped by the office to blow off some political steam today and he used a charming West Texas phrase that summed things up nicely:
“Don’t piss on my hat and tell me it’s raining.”
The trouble is that people haven’t tried out the practical application of that phrase lately. Bush won because his pretty lies sounded better than the rather harsh truth. We’ve got soldiers dying by the dozen in Iraq. Job growth and the economy are flat. The national debt is in the trillions and growing. And Bush keeps saying that if we let him keep doing what he’s been doing, everything is going to turn out all right. Unfortunately, nobody pointed out that we’ve all been pissed on for four years, and our hats are pretty much soaked through.
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Tagged Politics