Today ended up being not so bad a day. Even though it was freezing cold and raining, I chatted with my mom on the phone my entire commute home. I’m still cold, but I just turned on the heat. I wish you could just heat up one room… I feel I am wasting energy heating up this massive house.
I got my first overdraft charge in a while today. It was because of that stupid collections agency from the hospital. I feel like I’m in debt to the mob. No matter what you do, they steal money from you. However, I did get two movies from Netflix today, Romance and Palindromes. One unintended benefit of the hour long commute is that I have started reading again… I blew through The Stranger and Ubik in this week alone. I need to go to the bookstore and get some new novels. I want to read The Fountainhead and a whole bunch of other books.
My wrists hurt so badly today… I hadn’t been taking ibuprofen because I wanted to let my stomach recover, but fuck it. I’ll just take two a day the rest of my life, I guess.
Work was quite stressful… this project that I had been trying to complete for ever was sort of due… and I had to print out hundreds of pages of reference material that I felt was irrelevant. I had a whole folder full of PDFs of my references, but no. He wanted them printed out. I hate being such a technophile… I keep having to suppress the urge to call people techtards. Actually, that’s not it at all. They just don’t know that they could spend half as much time doing some of the tasks that they do painstakingly using ancient software. I am glad that one of my coworkers is trying to make sure that we all upgrade to OS X, but the phrase “lipstick on a pig” is quite apropos. A Power Mac G3 (circa 1997), which crashes when I run Internet Explorer and Word simultaneously, is not going to be improved by an operating system upgrade. Eh, it’s not my problem. But it still makes me angry that I don’t have my own computer to work on. I’m stuck between either the glorified Abacus (the G3) or the blazing fast dual processor G5 (which is a community computer and I’m kicked off of it often). Just give me a G4 Mac Mini and I’m fine. I don’t know… it’s frustrating to be in the same room as a computer that you can get your work done on and not be able to use it.
I tried to call Adrian again today… I just get a beeping noise when I call his phone, no response from the voicemail I left on the AOL account, and he’s not signed on to AIM. I don’t know whether he’s ignoring everybody or it’s connectivity issues, but I miss him. The last time we hung out it was so great… I don’t know what’s going on. I shouldn’t speculate. It’s two damn weeks until I can get my bike back. I just feel really down because of this rainy weather and I know that seeing him will bring me out of it, but it doesn’t seem like that’s going to happen anytime soon.
I was so cold today, my teeth were chattering on the walk to the train. It was total Crescent City weather. Waiting for a bus in the rain is not fun. I should snuggle up in a blanket and watch one of my movies.
On a lighter note, when I got off at my bus stop, John (my alcoholic uncle) was there strapping his bike to the front of the bus. I said hello to him, and he called me Trevor or Pete or some random name. He is so odd. And alcoholic.
Well, I’m going to watch a movie. Here’s a picture of the cool drive I bought myself for my b-day/christmas. 500GB of sexiness:
Also, I upgraded my Wordpress (the software the powers the blog section of the site) install from 2.0.3 to 2.0.5. Can you tell I was bored Sunday night? It’s supposed to have a bunch of security fixes and stability improvements, but it’s such a tiny change in the version number… I didn’t notice anything different. Yay for security and stability snake oil!
In other random technology related news, I just got a license to the MacOS FTP program Fetch (Dragon typed “Fetish,” lol). Before, I had been using the free open-source Cyberduck. While I am normally a fan of free, open-source software… let’s face it. Cyberduck sucks. One night it crashed a total of seventeen times. You’re lucky when you finish an upload before the program crashes or randomly disconnects and doesn’t understand how to automatically reconnect. Long story short, I hate Cyberduck. I recently found out that you can get a free educational license to Fetch. I applied for one, was accepted, and I’m now in SFTP heaven. It hasn’t crashed once, and even made it through the complicated file wrangling that ensued from the Wordpress upgrade. So…die Cyberduck, long live Fetch.
In more random news, I fixed up the NaturallySpeaking Wikipedia article. See that info box and screenshots? All me, baby.
Ubik is my favorite Dick novel. I think you would enjoy The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch too.
If I were going to see you soon, I would take you out for a lovely meal for your birthday. Remember last year? Oh well, we’ll take a rain check.
By the way, Princess Bride–the movie is just okay. The book, however, is a lot of fun.