Work has been insane lately. On Friday we had a celebration (potluck lunch) for the "end of the beginning" of the school year, but my team is still very much in the middle of a crunch time with deadlines approaching. Things should settle down a little bit in a couple of weeks ( Read more... )

Water heater was fixed this morning. The guy who came out was very professional and friendly, he quickly identified the problem as being the lower heating element had burned out. He recommended replacing both elements and thermostats, and I thought that was appropriate so I paid extra for those additional parts. Later I followed up with the boss ( Read more... )

I've been so damn busy, I'll have to sit down and catch up on here. But not now. This is just a quick story about Christmas ( Read more... )

Rather than write a single coherent post, here's a few quickies ( Read more... )

I've been using my gmail account more and more, lately. When I am away from my work PC, I will download my work email with it, and it works very well. However, as far as I can tell, there is no way to set the interval of time it waits between checking for new mail ( Read more... )

Back in March I signed a lease to move in to my apartment on May 28. It didn't occur to me that this would fall on Memorial Day until just a couple of weeks ago, so I called the leasing office and asked if there would be any difficulties with that. Actually, I was hoping for an early move-in so I could spend more of the long weekend shopping for ( Read more... )

2 quick things:

(1) If you leave a CamelBak in your closet for a few months, the water reservoir and tubes and stuff will get hella nasty with mold and bacterial slime. I gave mine a good hot water scrubbing and ran a denture tablet through, and I am still a little worried about contracting SARS the next time I use it.

(2) You can't get only ( Read more... )

I'm not a terribly religious person, but I think that religion (and Catholicism in particular) is one of the most complex and beautiful creations of mankind. I feel the same way about mathematics.

So, last week the ice maker was dispensing crushed ice even when it was set to cubes*. Well, guess what... It makes cubes* again without any intervention on my part!

* The shape of the so-called "cubes" is actually a hemicylinder.

I really liked the way Movie Notes worked in the past, as a sort of mini-review with looser guidelines that all friends can see. This new direction of changing a Movie Note into something more like a Myspace message doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I suppose it adds a certain degree of audience filtering, but most of the time when I want to ( Read more... )