Month in Review

Since I’ve been a bit quiet of late, I thought I should do an overview of the assorted miscellany that’s been going on. So, in no particular order, I present to you the month in review.

Since I got my laptop a couple of years ago, one thing has never worked. I could never get wireless to work properly in Linux. This was due largely to the fact that the card which came with it was a Broadcom. We tried everything including ndiswrapper. Not even my friends who write kernel modules were able to get it to work.

A couple of months ago, I finally broke down and got a new wireless card from Netgear. Within 30 minutes, it was up and running. The drivers aren’t native, but I had zero problems with the ones from MadWifi, so now I can start using Linux more regularly again.

Ironically, I read that the next kernel is supposed to have built in support for Broadcom wireless cards. Go figure.

I had a meeting with some headhunters last week, so I have more eyes out there looking to place me in a F/T position since I am tired of contracting. It ended up being a longer meeting than I was expecting because I ended up talking to several of them. Hopefully something positive comes out of this especially since I had to wear long sleeves and a tie in 95 degree weather. =]

The above is also what caused me to miss the TIGAR awards. However, I consider that a legitimate reason. Sorry, John.

I am, however, pre-registered for Ohio Linux Fest. If you’re in the area and are free that day, register and attend. It’s a decent conference.

I was without power one day and without cable and telephone the next because we were having a tree removed from the back yard since it would have fallen over before too many more seasons had passed. You never realize how much you need email until you can’t use it.

As some of you have noticed, I added RSS to the website and blog a couple of weeks ago. It surprises me the number of hits that it gets per day. I honestly didn’t think there were that many people who read this.

Also, in order to make the growth of the site a bit more orderly, I rearranged some things on the back end. It shouldn’t impact anything you see, but it will make my life easier as I continue to add things to the site. If you find anything broken, please let me know.

The last bit of news is that the weird referrals to the site continue. At one point last year, for some odd reason, I was getting referrals from a German porn site. Don’t ask me why. I don’t know and I’m not sure I want to know.

This month, the #2 referrer (just behind Google) is a site called dvd4arab. Apparently there is a link to me in one of their threads. I don’t know why they’re linking to me, just that they are. I can just see me having made some DHS list now because of the people visiting my site. Now all I need is some religious fundamentalist site linking to me, and I could have a great trifecta of weird referrers.

Well, that just about covers everything that has been of moderate interest for the month but has gotten lost in the shuffle. This month has just been kind of busy in a grind way instead of lots of exciting things.

Current mood: neutral
Current music: American Express – Find a New Way

You know, with all of the things going on both where I am and around the world, there are any number of things that I could rant on or discuss or give my opinion on.

I’m not going to do that tonight.

Instead, I think I’ll just say something that (I hope) is a lot more positive.

Last week, I got a card in the mail from a good friend of mine that I don’t get to talk to much anymore. It was a wedding invitation.

I’d just like to say congratulations and that I wish him well even though I won’t be able to make it to the ceremony. I hope it works out well, Tony. You deserve it.

Current mood – not bad
Current music – The Wreckers – Leave the Pieces

Interesting news… and a rant.

I realize that I don’t rant here much. Generally most of the “negative” things I have to say are said in a joking manner. There are, of course, exceptions, but the vast majority are said tongue in cheek. This one, however, is completely serious and something that I view as a real, honest problem.

I would also like to apologize in advance for being a little long-winded on this post.

Before we get to that, though, let’s do the news part. There will be plenty of time for the rant afterward.

The news is that the people who thought that Ken Lay, the one responsible for the Enron debacle, would get away without any jail time were absolutely right. He has died of a coronary before his sentencing could take place.

I’m not quite sure how I feel about that. Part of me is surprised. Part of me isn’t. Part wanted to see him face sentencing and part of me just kind of shrugs at the way it turned out. Oh well, I’m sure I’ll figure it out before too long. It just seems kind of ironic to go through the whole trial and have him die basically right before sentencing.

I think part of me feels like they should pass sentence anyway just so we can draw this to a close. Not that it really matters. It’s just that it seems like the ultimate loose end.

In other, probably less interesting news, I have added an RSS feed to the blog and website. I figure that I update often enough that it is warranted.

Now, on to the rant.

I have maintained that I have almost no problem in dealing with accents. I’ve worked with, been friends with, and known people from all over the world. As long as we can both speak English (or enough of another language that I understand), I can communicate with said person without a whole lot of trouble.

There is, however, a certain company that is making me seriously reconsider this position. I think it’s the same company, anyway. If it isn’t, then it’s a really disturbing trend.

About every two weeks, I’ll get a call from a recruiting firm that says they saw my resume online. This in itself is nothing abnormal, and I have no problem with it. In fact, I am looking for a new full time position now that I am finished with the magazine and the fact is that I am kind of tired of contracting because constantly looking for new clients gets old after a while.

The problem is that first, it sounds like they’re using voip (judging from the delay and static) and second, that the person on the other end of the line is Indian with an accent so thick that even *I* have trouble with it.

They start out by asking me inane questions like do I have any experience in an IT setting which can be answered by simply *glancing* at my resume. Of course I have no experience. My resume just has software developer and network analyst/system administrator positions on it for no reason. Please take the time to at least look at what you’re calling me about first.

Next, in the midst of trying to answer their questions, I will tell them that I can’t understand them (which is true) and ask if they could contact me via email instead. Instead of doing so, the person on the other end just keeps on with their script.

This annoys me. I restate my request and they keep going, so I inform them that since they do not listen, I have no desire to do business with them and hang up.

A couple of weeks later, it all happens again. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Now, this is bad for a few reasons – first, communication is important in any relationship (business, friendship, romantic, etc). In a business setting, the person you have dealing with the general public should be able to speak in a manner which will be easily understood *by* the general public. This means that they speak the same language (in this case English), they speak at an understandable speed, and with an appropriate (or a “generic”) accent.

Doing this cuts down on a great deal of communications overhead and is a lesson that has been learned by everyone from the phone company and telemarketers to brick and mortar stores. Unfortunately, however, it does not seem to have been learned by a lot of technical companies. Here’s a hint – the same rules apply to you too.

Second, placing someone whom you know will not be understood by your target audience in a position which deals with them extensively shows an extreme lack of respect for your intended audience. In this case, if a company does this while they are trying to recruit me, they are not going to be able to do so. At all.

Third, the chances are that, if you continue to act in this manner, word will get around and it will be very difficult to connect with more customers (in this case, potential employees).

Like I said before, I think that this is the same company that has contacted me in the past. If that is the case, then they really need to get their act together. If not, then this is a disturbing trend.

Having said that, if anyone is interested in hiring me to work at a (mostly) sane company where the employees are treated with some measure of respect and not like instantly replaceable cogs in a machine, feel free to contact me. I am more than willing to listen and will relocate for the right opportunity.

I just saw an article in The Register about a poll of developers about the quality of various IDEs. Their conclusion? That Eclipse and NetBeans come in dead last.

This survey made me shake my head. It was an extremely poor excuse for a “study”. Why, you ask? First, they polled a whopping 1,200 people (that’s like asking 5 people on the street what they think of a local issue and calling it an official poll). Second, there is almost no way at all that the people they asked had experience in all of the IDEs that they listed. There were eleven IDEs listed covering a pretty wide variety of languages.

Here’s a hint, people. Looking at a pretty screen for five minutes is no way to say one IDE is better than another. You need to have actual experience in using them.

It really looked like a high school popularity contest. I just wondered who funded Evans Data Corp’s little “study”.

Do I think everything about Eclipse is perfect? No. My main complaint is that the Auto-Complete list takes too long to appear a fair amount of the time whereas on Visual Studio, it appears by about the second character of a member function/variable that you type. Is this a huge problem? Not really. I just hate digging through docs to get the proper order of arguments.

This sort of thing really makes me wonder who actually takes these “studies” seriously. They really aren’t worth the time it took to do them (though I am sure that the groups that do them are compensated *quite* well for their trouble).

Current mood: annoyed
Current music: Deadsy – The Key to Gramercy Park

Well, this evening was certainly interesting. I went over to the neighbor’s house to watch the fireworks. There were many pretty lights (many of which hurt my eyes – being photosensitive can be a real bear at times), lots of whizzing sounds, and a lot of smoke.

I even managed to get hit squarely in the chin by a falling ember. That’s always fun.

Then came the last firework of the evening. The roman candle was lit. It then proceeded to fall over and orient itself toward the crowd of us. Nine screaming balls of colored fire rocketed toward us (and their house, and the cars, and my house, and the other neighbors’ cars…).

People scattered. It was nuts. Several of us almost got hit, and a few of us changed direction only to have the pyrotechnic pursuer curve along the same basic path. Talk about a great close to the evening. heh

Their daughter wanted to set off fireworks last night, but now that she’s been chased by the last firework of the evening, she has declared that she doesn’t want anything to do with them anymore. I’m sure she’ll be ready again by next year =]

Current mood: amused
Current music: Roxette – The Look

I have met yet another example of a company that I have no desire to work for in the last week.

I was told by a consulting company that part of the requirements before I even got an interview was to turn over my client list. I spent the next 5 minutes telling her that there was no way that was going to happen and she spent it trying to convince me that it was a standard and acceptable practice.

Sorry, people, but that’s not the mark of a company looking for new employees. That’s the mark of a company looking for new clients and wanting to weasel them out of other people.

My FAQ just got a new entry.

Current mood: amused
Current music: INXS & Jimmy Barnes - Good Times

I’ve said it before – I like Perl. It’s a useful language for doing some things. I think it’s used by too many people for things that it shouldn’t be, but then most languages are. It’s not my choice for a main language, but it does some things pretty well.

That being said, I have to say that I’ve been playing around with Ruby a bit more lately, and I’m starting to like it better than Perl. There are two main reasons for this – the first is that it’s a lot more cross platform than Perl is. You can actually use it on Windows without fear of strange quirks (O’Reilly makes Perl on Win32 for a reason). Second, the syntax is a whole heck of a lot more readable.

Okay, so regular expressions still look like my cat ran across the keyboard, but they always have and probably always will. For the rest of it though, Ruby’s object oriented nature makes the code look a whole lot less complicated, and the less time I have to spend trying to figure out what an app does, the more time I have for solving problems. I like being able to do things like call somearray.length to get the length instead of trying to assign the array to a scalar in order to get how long it is. It just makes a heck of a lot more sense.

Let’s face it, Perl is probably the only language in the world in which you can roll your head across the keyboard and then watch the resulting script compile. There’s no guarantee as to what it will do – for all you know before you run it, the script may end up causing a rift to open at your feet from which emerges Huang Ti along with a standing field army of terra cotta golems animated by the spirits of the soldiers that were under his command when he was alive (if this confuses you, don’t worry. It’s sort of an inside joke. Though if you’re just wondering who Huang Ti is, he was the first emperor of China). Then again, it may do no more than the program I wrote once when I was 21 after I had been out with some friends for the weekend (it compiled, but I have no idea what I was thinking when I wrote it), but the chances are that it will compile.

In all honesty, I believe that there is a reason Larry Wall, the creator of Perl, has won the International Obfuscated C Contest twice.

Perl, you have been useful, and I may still end up using you on occasion, but I think that, for the time being at any rate, Ruby is going to become my choice as far as scripting languages go.

Current mood: neutral
Current music: Michael Hutchence – Slide Away

It’s official – I have relinquished all of my final responsibilities at o3 Magazine.

Since stepping down as executive editor in February, I stayed on board as an editorial advisor for the last several months, but the time has come to pass the reins to someone else.

It was an interesting trip, and I wish them the best in the future. As for me, my own path lies in a different direction.

(I should also point out that this has nothing to do with the previous post. That situation arose because of some things from the past in my personal life coming to my attention. It happens to the best of us.)

Current mood: calm
Current music: Shades Apart – Beat by Beat

The last couple of days have been filled with introspection and looking at things from my past.

The people who know me well enough know some of the things in my past that I wouldn’t tend to wish on anyone. For the rest of you, let’s just say that it’s been an interesting trip filled with a lot of rocks (nothing illegal or that I feel like I need to hide – just things that I don’t tend to want to think about or discuss with people that weren’t involved).

While I am mostly at peace with the things that have happened over the years and the person I have become, I am reminded of the quote which basically states that behind every cynic is an idealist who wonders what the hell happened.

I admit it. I used to be an idealist. I even used to smile a lot more. Now, I tend to be something of a hopeful cynic and quite a bit more reserved.

Hopeful cynic? Isn’t that a contradiction in terms, you ask?

Not really. It means that while you hope the outcome will be better than you expect, you don’t bet on it. Just because you try to avoid the obstacles doesn’t mean that you think you’ll always succeed.

I don’t give up. I just expect that, at certain points, I will likely have my head handed to me.

But right now, I’m at the point of wondering what the hell happened even though I already know the answer. I think that sometimes, just sometimes, we have to spend time thinking about that sort of thing in order to make it anywhere. The trick is to not to be consumed by it – looking into the abyss, as Nietzsche would have said.

Current mood: contemplative
Current music: Erase the Grey - Rain

It’s been an interesting last couple of days.

The weather was beautiful yesterday, so I decided to spend some time training at the lake – just me, the wind on the waves, and my jian (Chinese straight sword). It felt great to have some quite time and get some exercise all at once. I paid for it later though =]

It’s been way too long since I’ve trained regularly, so after about 45 minutes, my right arm felt like jello. This is not a big deal. It just means that I need to be more active again. I can deal with that.

Today’s amusement, however, comes in the form of email. Being in a smallish town that doesn’t have a great deal in the way of tech companies, I found a couple that were actually listed on the chamber of commerce’s website, so I wrote to introduce myself. I don’t know many people here in town and meeting people in my field is quite often a positive thing.

The first one’s owner and I seem to get along pretty well and are supposed to have lunch soon. The second one, however, was a whole other story. I send a basic “hi” email and get a “what do you want” type response, so I say that I just really kind of want to get to know the other technical people in the area and get a response of “I don’t give out information about my company” that suggests he thought I wanted to take over his business, but that if I wanted to send him my resume he’d look it over and decide if I fit anywhere in his organization.

That amused me. I just kind of sat there and looked at the screen for a minute. First off, I wasn’t trolling for a job. Secondly, I wouldn’t want to work with or for someone who behaved in a manner that paranoid and unprofessional. I don’t need the headache.

I told this to my friend and he joked that the guy probably thought that I was attempting industrial espionage. I’m just waiting to get a visit from the FBI now – especially since my resume contains the word “subversion” (as in the source control tool).

And just to go completely off-topic for a moment – why the heck is the sci-fi channel showing wrestling now?

Current mood: amused
Current music: Flogging Molly – Black Friday Rule

It seems as though Lucent has seen fit to close down Bell Labs and will be moving the remaining employees to various other locations. The building itself, which holds a great deal of technical history, is to be sold off and all expectations are that it will be demolished.

This makes me sad.

The city in which it is housed says that it doesn’t want to have the property turn into just another subdivision. I can agree with this. In fact, I think it’s sad that the Labs are closing their doors at all. However, the stated reason kind of annoyed me – the city gets millions in taxes from the property and has to deal with very little in the way of upkeep costs for infrastructure because the property is a largely pastoral setting. They don’t want to build and maintain infrastructure in order to get their tax money.

Guess what – that’s their responsibility. They need to deal with it.

One of the main bidders for the property wants to turn the property into more office space while supposedly maintaining the pastoral nature of the setting. They have a reputation for renovating existing factory, etc space into office space, however in this case they want to tear down the building because they don’t think that any tenants would want to buy offices there.

Am I the only one that thinks it sounds weird that they believe nobody would want to have space in a building which gave birth to some of the greatest technological breakthroughs of the last century?

As for Lucent, I don’t understand them. They bought the Labs for the R&D that they do. They then proceed to cut the legs out from under the whole thing (only about 1,000 people work there now compared to something like 5,000 in its previous days of glory) and now they want to carve it up and ship it off to other places that are “more in keeping with the size of corporate headquarters.”

In my personal opinion, they are making a huge mistake. Part of the reason that Bell Labs was so successful was that you had a huge number of extremely intelligent people all in one place working on things that interested them. This let them bounce ideas off of each other without any problem at all. In fact, from what I understand, it used to be extremely common for people to just sort of get pulled into projects as a natural matter of course instead of being assigned to them.

That makes a very fertile environment for innovation. The fact that it was in a pretty, relaxed location just makes it even more conducive to the kind of thought and work that they did. It’s really hard to innovate under pressure and in surroundings that feel hostile.

Take that away, and they’re just going to be sticking smart people in random, unfriendly office space and the innovation will definitely suffer. I see this as a very bad move.

I know what some of you are thinking – but all offices are sort of impersonal. Cubes are the order of the day and our people seem to do just fine.

Cubes are the order of the day, but they shouldn’t be for any place that does innovative work or work that requires actual concentration. Cubes were made for one purpose – to save a few dollars on office space. Believe it or not, even the guy who invented them now thinks they weren’t such a great idea.

They’re fine if all you do is talk on the telephone (sales or call center jobs), but for things that require quiet (say R&D or programming), they’re just a really bad idea.

They’re loud, they’re too open to the outside world (which causes distraction), and they’re generally extremely cramped. They’re also extremely impersonal (even to the point of some companies having policies that you can’t decorate them at all).

I can hear it now – “So what? They’re not supposed to be personal space. They’re supposed to be workspace.”

Wrong. The “workplace is not personal space” idea probably came about with the industrial revolution. Prior to that, craftsmen worked in spaces that they generally had a great deal of control over. This means that they had things laid out just the way they wanted and in ways that made them more productive.

It is extremely difficult to be productive while doing complex tasks if you are in a location which you are not comfortable with. Every moment you spend thinking how unsettling your surroundings are is a moment that you can’t focus on the problem at hand (though some might argue that the surroundings are the problem at hand. I happen to be one of them).

As far as the “cost savings” of cubes goes, ask yourself this – how much would it cost you for actual office space with real walls? How much are you paying for this “open office plan” crap you have now? Now, with those numbers in mind, think of how productive your staff that would benefit from offices is now. Now, think of how much more productive they would be (and how many fewer mistakes they would make) if they did not have to deal with the distractions of the rest of the cube farm.

It’s kind of like R&D (getting back to my original point) – it’s not necessarily cheap, but it more than pays for itself in the long run. Stop living quarter to quarter and make long term plans.

Current mood: contemplative
Current music: Verve Pipe – The Freshmen

The Saga of Thunderbird
Or
How I got a 17 Page Sig


This is where we see how I work through a trivial problem occuring in a trivial project for an equally trivial purpose. The journey, for me at least, is amusing.

I’ve been bored with my simple mail sig for a while, so I thought about writing a script to rotate the quote that appears below my contact information.

No big deal, I thought. I’ll just script up a sig file maker. Thunderbird should have no problem dealing with the output of a script as the sig, right?

Well, not really.

This is a Windows system, so I decided to write the script in Ruby. If you haven’t used Ruby, it’s a handy language in the vein of Perl and other scripting languages. The main reason I decided on Ruby instead of Perl is that Ruby has a really good implementation for Windows that works exactly like you’d expect it to and Perl can have some quirks in Windows (not for anything this simple, but I use Perl for *nix and I’ve started using Ruby in Windows).

My script, when it began, consisted of a few things – an array of strings that is approximately 17 pages long (I have a lot of quotes), a puts statement that outputs my contact information, and a line that outputs a random quote from the array.

After finishing the script, I change my account settings in Thunderbird to use the script, thinking that it would just take the output and use that. Stupid assumption on my part (and I honestly admit that). It took the whole file as a sig. That’s right – I had a 17 page sig.

Just what everyone wants – 20k of quotes tacked onto the end of a less than 1k email.

Next, I try explicitly launching Ruby and feeding it the script in my account settings. This, not surprisingly, doesn’t work either, but it was worth a shot.

Well, that’s not going to work, so after thinking for a second, I decide that the next best thing would be to have a new sig for every time Windows starts. This being the case, I try to add the script with the output redirected to a text file (which Thunderbird will read correctly) into the startup routine for logging on to Windows.

Can’t do that. Windows doesn’t like having the re-direct as part of the shortcut.

So much for the quick and dirty way. Time for the almost as quick and not quite so dirty way.

I go back to the script, make a line to open a file, take out the puts statements, replace them with write statements that write to the file, and close the file.

It now works, Windows runs it on startup, and I have a new quote for my sig when I want it.

What’s so funny about this? That’s how I was going to do it in the first place, but I thought I’d save myself a tiny little bit of typing by doing it the “easy” way.

Consider it a lesson learned. Or should I say a lesson re-learned since we all seem to have to go through this one once in a while.

Hey, at least it was on a quick little project instead of something buried deep inside a complex program.

Current mood: amused
Current music: Dirty Vegas – A Million Ways

To whomever has used my domain name in their return address for spam emails,

I’d love to find you so I could beat you to death with a large, heavy blunt object.

I check my mail today and find 50+ “returned” emails from addresses that have bounced. None of the addresses I saw were ones that I had ever emailed in the past and the email addresses that were listed as being from my domain don’t exist.

Thinking I may have been hit with a worm for the first time ever, I run a scan. Four hours later, I find that the machine is completely clean. Yes, it takes this laptop four hours to run a full antivirus and spyware scan because of the insane number of files on it even though it’s a 2.4ghz machine.

So basically, this cost me ¼ of my day so that the only thing I could do here was read or watch television because it was raining and unpleasant outside.

Current mood: annoyed
Current music: Yellowcard – Lights and Sounds

It seems to have been the day of phone calls.

First, there was the almost unintelligible call from what appears to be an Indian outsourcing company which is looking to put someone in a position in a city about an hour or so from here.

Normally, I don’t have a problem dealing with accents. I’ve known a lot of people from all over the world, so accents are really just par for the course for me. The problem with this one was the fact that it sounded like it went from an actual phone somewhere to a VoIP server, became packets that were flung across the internet via various combinations of physical lines and satellite, hit another VoIP server, were translated back into an actual phone transmission and then ended up at my handset.

That makes things a bit harder to understand.

The other call was from a recruiter in Pitt calling about an opening in Cleveland. Unfortunately it was a senior position and I’m not a senior person. On the upside, they sounded like they were interested in me for other possible positions, so they are supposed to be calling back tomorrow in order to get to know me better. This kind of behavior is kind of strange for a lot of “recruiters” because they tend to just throw resumes at a position and hope one sticks. I take this as a positive sign about these people.

Sometime next week, I should be having lunch with a local businessperson who runs a tech company here in town. I saw a strange posting on a job board for them so I decided to drop them a line and ask about the unusual requirements and introduce myself. On a personal/tech level, we seem to have hit things off since we seem to have some things in common.

Don’t look at me like that. It’s purely professional. Besides, it will be nice to have someone to talk to in this town considering the fact that I know almost nobody here.

Current mood: tired
Current music: INXS & Jimmy Barnes – Good Times

Well, my least favorite task is done for the year.

The cat has had his vet visit. Vet visits are never fun. There’s whining, biting, dirty looks and the cat doesn’t take it well either.

It’s hard to get him into the carrier at the house. It’s hard to get him out of the carrier at the vet’s – the carrier quite often has to be taken apart. It’s very easy to get him back into the carrier, and you’re lucky if the carrier has a door left on it when we get into the house.

This year wasn’t so bad though. These vets actually listened and left the handling of the furry demon up to me (he’s part wildcat – probably bobcat, and I am about the only person he won’t normally stick his over sized fangs into and if he does, it’s only to play or a light warning bite) after I warned them that he left his old vet in stitches a couple of times.

I thought it was amusing that the vet marveled at his teeth. She’d never seen fangs that big on a “housecat”. Hey, to me he’s a big fluffy marshmallow. To most other people on the other hand…

Standard checkup, rabies, leukemia, etc shots and his worming (this year they decided they valued their hands and gave him the shot instead of pills. That’s where he always gets revenge on the vet) and we were on our way back to the house. Once out of the carrier, he was torn between wanting to curl up next to me for comfort and snubbing me because I was the evil bastard that put him through all of the horrible tortures of the day.

Current mood: relaxed
Current music: Toad the Wet Sprocket – Hold Her Down

Keyboard came in, and for the last day I’ve been getting used to the layout as well as the shape of the keys.

Shape of the keys, you ask? Yes, this is one of the ergo boards that have parallelogram shaped keys to allow you to have a natural wrist position when you type instead of having to lay your hands at the “normal” typing angle. The frightening thing is that it really works.

It occurred to me this morning that the keyboard and mouse might not work with the linux partition on the laptop. Yes, I just realized that this morning. I was pleasantly surprised when it recognized both on boot up. Getting linux to recognize anything used to be painful when I first started using it years ago.

It really is improving. Now I just need a wireless card with linux support. Broadcom has real issues.

But, for now, I’m just sitting here, killing Spree.

Relax. I’m talking about the candy.

Fruity =]

Current mood: relaxed
Current music: none

Well, the keyboard should be here sometime tomorrow. Then I can finally get things arranged in a comfortable manner and get back down to business. It feels so nice to have a real workspace again.

I still can’t believe that I had to order something as simple as a USB keyboard. It’s no wonder there aren’t many technically oriented businesses here.

There is one other thing I want. One of these and a 200gb IDE hard drive to go with it. Anyone want to buy me one? =]

Current mood: amused
Current music: Nine Days – If I Am

Birthday was rather uneventful. Mostly time just spent out of the house. I think the most exciting thing I bought was lunch.

The next few days saw me rearranging things in this room and picking up a new desk and leather office chair. All I can say is that my wrist ached after putting together the desk. Two hours with a screwdriver was just no fun.

But now the desk and chair are together and being used. My frequently used books are sitting next to me, I have space to work and have a reference book open next to me, and a much more comfortable place to sit.

I love my chair. I know it sounds silly, but I’d forgotten how nice it is to have a good office chair. =]

Now I just want to get a USB keyboard so I can have things in a more natural layout. It’s sad when you have to order something that simple online, but there is no place here in town that has one I want.

Current mood: tired
Current music: Living Things – Bom Bom Bom

It’s my birthday.

I really need to get out of the house and spend some time alone so I probably won’t be here all day. If you need me, call the cell.

Let’s hope this year’s is better than the last.

I love Penn and Teller. When I was a kid, it wasn’t the David Copperfields or Houdinis of the world that got me interested in sleight or hand, stage magic, etc, it was Penn and Teller.

Why? Because they were smartasses about it, had fun with it, and weren’t afraid to show you how they did it. With them, it wasn’t some big mystery. In fact, I remember seeing them do tricks again after the initial presentation using clear props and showing you just how bizarre the whole thing really was.

Their personalities just really clicked with me.

What does this have to do with anything? A book I ordered came in today.

I’ve wanted this book since I first heard about it as a kid when it came out back in 1992. It’s out of print now, so about the only way you’ll find it is on the used marketplace on Amazon (or ebay, etc). I finally got around to getting a copy and have been giggling evilly ever since.

What book? “Penn and Teller’s How to Play with your Food”

Yes, you can run in fear now. The people who know me fairly well already know that I enjoy cooking. Put this together with my prank loving side and the world should be afraid.

For those of you who know me in person and think I seem too uptight to enjoy a good prank (either playing it on others or having it played on me), you really don’t know me as well as you seem to think.

Let’s just say that I’m going to make their special heart shaped Jell-o. The difference is that I have a *real* heart shaped mold *wicked grin*

I have one shaped like an anatomically correct brain too =]

Current mood: amused
Current music: Eve6 - Bang