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News (or something like it)
08.17.03 Short Week, Jam Packed I had one of those nights last night where you think that you've laid awake the whole night. But there were 2-3 hour gaps between when I looked at the clock, and I don't think I'd have the self control not to look every 20 minutes if I'd actually been awake. Whether I slept or not, I'm not feeling very rested. On the bright side, it's a short week. Sort of. It's chocked full of 3 doctor's appointments, the State Fair, a work boat ride, a cousin's wedding, a dinner party, and overnight guests. At work, two large sites (a b) were supposed to go live last week and didn't, so they'll probably be freaking out this week, and two small sites need functioning drafts by Wednesday. Oh, and it's Dave's birthday on Wednesday. Not the kind of week that you want to start out tired for. p.s. Pirates of the Carribbean was really good. 08.16.03 Entertaining myself at home Yesterday was payday, so yesterday was bill day. After mailing off all my money, I'll be spending the next couple of weeks entertaining myself at home. That means a lot of baking, cleaning and this morning, fuckin' with the web site. If things are broken, well, that's because I broke them. I don't think I'll be changing the design -- not sick of this one yet. Mostly, so far, I've deleted a bunch of crud that was living on the server for no good reason. Now I'm going to start thinking about content -- deleting old stuff, updating other things, putting things here and there. Suggestions, of course, could be welcome. The big exciting plan for this weekend is to take Mara to see Pirates of the Carribean. Let's hope that the Star Tribune is correct that it's no scarier than Harry Potter, otherwise we'll have to apologize to Michelle for 3am nightmares. Eep! The middle of week is always the a killer. My boss keeps buzzing me, freaking out, obviously wanting me to take over something she's working on, but I've got other stuff that's equally important to complete. She won't get it done by 5 and I'll be here late doing it for her, or doing it over again, when they're already getting an extra half hour outa me cuz I came in at 12:30 and we're not allowed to take vacation in less than 4 hour increments. Two more days and then I'm free again for a little while. If you get a chance, go to the Red Sea tonight and see Eyes to Space -- JJ's band. I plan on hitting it! I have been officially discharged from finger therapy. Yeah! Now I just have to use it and keep doing the exercises to make sure that it stays limber. I don't think I'm in a whole lot of danger of not using my right index finger... I'm not so happy about the big old calcification bump that apparently is going to hang around for pretty much oh, ever. 08.06.03 Shiny Shit Wins Again When I learned that the "Last Comic Standing" was going to be determined by audience vote, I knew that the winner would not be the funniest comic. I've seen too many road hacks have killer sets to be that optimistic. I won't go so far as to say that Dat Phan is everything that is wrong with comedy, but I will say that he's indicative of what is wrong with audiences. Tim is trying to give him the benefit of the doubt, and I will grant that several of the annoying things about him may simply be due to the fact that he's green. He's been doing stand up comedy for two years which means he's basically one step off of the open stage. He's gotten this far not because he's a compelling presence with fresh ideas, but because he's one more driven actor whose charts and graphs show that it'll be easier to make a break in acting if he spends some time as a stand up comic. Great. He'll get a Barq's commercial and be ecstatic and in the meantime, the rest of America will miss out on the next "Seinfeld" or "Friends" because Mr. jump around and talk in a funny voice was deemed funnier than Mr. or Ms. clever writing with a point by the public. Why does it matter? Am I a humor snob? Maybe. But that's only because I see in humor the ability, and perhaps therefore the responsibility, to reach, test, educate and heal the masses. If the show had been "Last Poet Standing" the viciousness of the house would have been the same or worse, and the voting would have been based on the rich quality of the poet's language, form and content -- and there would have been about 12 viewers nationwide. That's really unfortunate, but it says that some other medium has to get the messages across. For the couple thousand road comics out there, that are concerned about the issues of the world, that love comedy deeply in their bones, that endure the little deaths of one-nighters in "Population 638" every week of their life, I'm sorry they had to see that show. (I know they watched.) I have one phrase that hopefully will make you feel better -- "I am funny and positive with my virgin material." For the American public that truly thought Dat Phan was the funniest comic, if you ever stop and wonder why a store screwed you or your taxes went up again, I hope you think back to the time when you laughed at /voted for someone that blinded you with the shiny shit so you wouldn't have to watch anything that might make you think, feel or learn. For months, my co-workers have been bugging me on "How do we get a domain name that someone else has already registered." Well, I told them, if you really really want it, you should call up the people that own it and ask them how much they'll sell it for. They didn't want to do that, so they kept asking me the question in a million different ways with me giving them the same answer. They finally settled on paying $80 to SnapNames.com to supposedly track and register the domain name in question. SnapNames would send my co-workers an email anytime anything would change -- they'd forward it to me and ask me what they should do. Of course, the answer was always, "Wait, or call the company that owns the domain and see if they want to sell." The name finally expired and was released over the weekend and SnapNames took our money and failed to secure the domain name. Gee, that's a nice little business scam. Now one of those "This Domain For Sale" brokers owns the name and if they want it they'll have to pay probably a lot more money than if they'd just contacted the original owner. It's unfortunate for our client, and fiscally unfortunate for us. No one will ever come up to me and say "Gee Steph, you were right, we should have at least called XYZ Corp." But I've learned that in the privacy of my cube I can smile and whisper to myself "I told you so" and get almost the same amount of satisfaction. Man, I'm continuously amazed at how much Mondays blow. I don't even dislike my job that much -- it's just the whole waking up and fulfilling someone elses* needs and fantasies instead of my own. Supposedly going to have a web site go live this Friday. Still waiting for content. Gonna have another one go live next Friday. Again, need content. Can't bitch too much though, they've actually gone much more smoothly than normal. The rest of the company seems too busy to second guess the design, and when we sent it to the client, he loved it with no changes. Really, a web dork's dream. Did I already tell everyone to go play the Shampoo game at SuperCuts.com? All the Flash thingies are done by Eric, my co-workers SO. Very fun. Okay, maybe not "FUN", but certainly not the whiney variety that's been spewing lately. A friend asked me for some recommendations of old movies which got me thinking about which ones are my favorites. I came up with this list: "It Happened
One Night" with Clark Gable & Claudette Colbert 07.31.03 A Fiendish Fingie On Tuesday, my general doctor told me I could stop wearing the splint on my finger. I did that, but still kind of favored it. When that seemed okay, I used it on Wednesday. In the morning, it felt pretty good, and I even typed a nice long email to my mom. By the end of the workday on Wednesday, it was pretty sore and I wasn't doing as much typing. By the time I was supposed to go to bed, it was throbbing and tingling and generally keeping me awake. This morning, it felt pretty good. But my early appointment today was at a physical therapist to check out my range of motion etc. She put me through a battery of exercises and tests to see how I was doing and so at the ripe old time of 10:30am, my whole arm aches not unlike it felt at the end of the day yesterday. This recovery shit hurts more than the injury! But she was somewhat optimistic -- the pain is most likely caused by using the atrophied muscles especially the ones in my wrist and elbow (huh) and that she was surpised that they told me to ditch the splint as soon as they had. I've got a bunch of exercises to do and an appointment on Monday. I'd say screw it to all of this, but I can't deny that it hurts and she put the fear of permanently doomed right index finger in me. Worse, though, is that a previously doctor free week (next week) now has two appointments. Bleah. 07.29.03 Almost at the end of July and I'm craving a vacation big time. No trips in sight, but this morning when I got the car washed, I looked at the sparkling sides and wished wished wished I was going on a road trip. Alas, I'm swamped at work, chocked full of doctor's appointments when I'm at home (finger is getting better, even if the typing is still sucking) and there's just no cash to take one of those irresponsible quick flight things. Maybe a nice fall trip... 07.23.03 Anniversary Today is the Mitchell's 4 year anniversary! Yeah for us! Insert all kinds of gag-me psycho affectionate stuff here. In less pleasant news, I'm working on the frog at work. Sure, I've got a ton of other, billable, work to do, but they're reviving the frog which means I'm rebuilding in all it's warty glory with a new, even slimier frog. When I get disgusted, i hop on over to Google and search on "Web Design Kill Me Now" and get this. Huh. 07.21.03 I fought the fridge and the fridge won Friday night I fixed the shower. Not qute as smoothly as I'd hoped -- I had some trouble getting the old cartidge out and the O-Ring repair kit I bought had the wrong sized Os. After a call to dad and a trip to Home Depot, the shower doesn't leak. Later that night, I lied in bed flipping through my Time-Life Fixit book looking up how hard it is to replace a gasket on the fridge. It looked pretty difficult. But what did look easy was pulling out the door switch, fixing the spring and voila, having a working light. Well, it proved tricky, and I proved incorrigible. I ended up gashing myself with a knife. Even though there wasnt a ton of blood, I felt pretty woozy. I asked Tim if he could do me a favor without giving me a bunch of crap -- when he found out I needed bandaids, he gave me that look. The "you did it again, didn't you" look. Sigh. After I thought the bleeding had stopped and I put a band-aid on it, I passed out cold, much to Tim's dismay. Disgusted with my wimpiness, I went to bed. Didn't sleep much, since my ankle and elbow were sore from where I'd bonked them meeting the bathroom floor. D'oh. Saturday morning it was pretty swollen so I swung by the urgent care to make sure it wasn't infected. It wasn't a bacteria problem. It was a broken finger problem. Bleah. So I spent the rest of the weekend feeling like I had a "We're #!" finger puppet on and not doing much else. Bear with my typing for a while. The finger pretty much only hurts if I torque it somehow. The tetanus shot, however, hurts 24/7. Stupid fridge. 07.17.03 Energy Pigs My electric bill last month was $71. This month is is $97. Thats a lot of cash that I would prefer not to spend. I blamed our vintage fridge, which we can all agree sux rox. Researching better ones left me with a $1200 investment that I can't afford right now even if they do use less electricity in a year than mine uses in 3 months. But the whole calculation formula for determining how much the fridge was costing me each month ($15) was interesting and it started getting me to think where I could save a little electricity, and therefore a little cash. Our house is full of stairs. We walk around at night. We don't want to break our legs, so we leave a lot of lights on. The basement nook has a 25w bulb on 24 hours a day. Its' costing me $1.29 per month. The livingroom -- 60w/24/7, $3.11/month. The office -- 150w/24/7, $7.77/month. We're geeks and we leave our computers on all the time. All of them. All the time. Emac, 170w/12/7, $4.40/month. Laptop, 45w/24/7, $2.33/month. The printer has a standby mode, so that's only costing us 45 cents/month. Tim's computer will never get shut off, so I won't even calculate that. If I turn off my computers, get a timer for the office and a couple of nightlights for the basement and livingroom, I theoretically should be able to save $17 per month. Not bad. I might even try a couple of stopgap measures on the old fridge -- replacing the gasket and sacrificing my ice cream to the energy saver. And in a mere 5 years, I'll have saved enough for a new fridge. 07.15.03 Had a nice visit with Tim's Grandmother Syd this week. Kept us on our toes and all of the news of this week is stuff like "Went to Cousin Ella's for dinner" etc. Family stuff is pretty much only of interest to your family. Tonight I plan to rest rest rest. After cooking cooking cooking and yakking yakking yakking, Syd's vacation leaves me ready for a vacation. Love to see folks though -- I'd do it again too. 07.09.03 My parents did everything first My parents were the first of their friends to get married. The first to have children. (Hmm? Coincidence?) The first to bury their parents. I have one remaining grandmother, but the others died 15-20 years ago. This means that I was pretty young and probably not as aware of the signs of grief or the magnitude of loss my folks must have felt. Now that my parent's friend's parents are dying and being buried, I have a new appreciation for their losses. It's amazing for me to see the kind of love and support my parents offer their friends and vice versa. These aren't just buddies they met at work, these are people that have been their best friends since they were 8 years old. They're my godparents, my "uncles" and "aunties". So even though Arling and Bud weren't my grandfathers, I feel that these were deaths in the family. My parents will not be the first of their friends to retire, but when they do, they're going to move from St. Louis, Missouri, to Cross Lake, Minnesota, to a cabin they just purchased -- next door to "Uncle" Bob's place. For a time I was kind of perturbed that when they finally moved "home" that they wouldn't live in the city, but I think that they'll love living next door to their friends. 07.07.03 Queen of petty tech support While I call myself a geek, I feel like I'm a poser. Sure, I know a little about computers and I can get my way around, but there are people that I know whose knowlege so far eclipses my understanding that I feel unworthy of the title. But that doesn't seem to stop my coworkers from calling me 100 times a day with their petty tech support needs. I guess I wouldn't mind if their questions had anything remotely to do with my job or my experience. I don't know where the market research server backs up their data. I don't know where the PC version of Outlook hides its spell check preferences, and I sure as heck don't know the dialup settings of their computers at home. I end up frustrating them and me with phrases like, "Well, on a MAC, you find the preference setting here..." or "Gosh, that's a question for RJ." Worse, when I say things like "I have no idea" they come back with "But will you look at it?" What I know that they don't is that computers all work about the same. Most programs have preference files that live in "Edit" or "Tools" menus, most file systems are comprised of files and folder and almost everything has a "Find" function. Finally, if you can't reproduce the problem, it was probably caused by operator error no matter how many times they claim they didn't do anything "different". Because I understand this, but more importantly because I don't seem to be able to get these facts across to folks, I end up "fixing" all kinds of things that people who use computers 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, really ought to be able to fix themselves. To these folks, I'm the queen of tech support and it's a damned thorny crown. 07.02.03 Sound I slept like a rock last night. I woke up this morning with the feeling like I hadn't moved for 7 hours. I'm not surprised, after work I set about laundry and ironing. All the washing was piling up because the weird smell that the dryer seemed to be making. On Sunday I bought a new exhaust pipe (I know it's not called that, but I'm having a blank right now) and installed it. After a load the bad smell went away. Good -- since I'd originally assumed the bad smell was lubricant from the new bearing wearing off, and later researched that it was probably nearly constant lint fires, I was glad. Apparently, if I work 8 hours in the office, then wash and iron for 5 1/2 when I get home, I'll sleep well. Or maybe I should try some of that Simply Sleep! 07.01.03 Congrats! Congratulations to Jen & David Russell on the birth of Emory Wall Russell at 1:30 am last night! Pictures forthcoming, I hope. (First & Second Quarter 2003 Archives)
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