hushed gray: the Kevin chronicles

Friday, November 02, 2007

Hold the Shift key and hit Refresh
It seems the masses demand an update, so here's an update. I'm worn out.

It's been a busy week at work, and for the second week in a row there's stuff left over for me to work on on Monday, but that's good. I'm going to be a little late getting to work on Monday--and hopefully only a little late. I have an appointment with the dentist at 7:30 in the morning--would love to be out of there by 8, but based on past experience at this place I won't be surprised if it's 8:30 before I'm able to head south. But it's got to be done--I'll just have to cut my lunch break short and if necessary stay late to make up for it.

On Wednesday night the laundromat was almost completely deserted--I presume a lot of folks must have been out doing their Halloween stuff. Their choice--meant I was pretty much able to make use of whichever machines I wanted. It would be nice to have in-home laundry facilities. From some casual scanning of the classifieds I don't know that I could even afford a place with washer/dryer hookups without sharing a house with someone, and although I had mostly decent roommates during college and immediately after it's not something I want to do again right now--there's just no stability whatsoever. One bedroom, one bath is all I need--but I don't want to spend on housing all of the additional money I'll be earning. If I find something significantly closer than what I've got now it would probably save me $50/mo. just on fuel, and sure, I can see paying a little more for an upgrade compared to what I'm in now, but...I don't know. We'll see what turns up in the next month or so.

I've fielded some interesting tech support questions at work. Many of them are beyond my level of knowledge, so I direct them on to my boss. There was one today, though, a question about whether or not it's possible to play a CD on a computer. That one I was able to address. There have been others...that's the one that comes to mind because it's still relatively fresh. The Web site update stuff is still going pretty well...sometimes it seems as though I'm doing the same chore twice or thrice, but when folks don't know exactly what they want the best I can do is create what I think they want and then adjust from there. That's customer service for you!

And on my lunch breaks I've been reading a PHP/MySQL book that Crystal (thanks, Crystal!) gave to me some time back. I'm really surprised at how many of the programming constructs (if-else statements, for loops, while loops, etc.) I remember from the couple of Java classes I took in college, but I'm only maybe 15 percent through the book, so I expect to run into some stuff that might be hard to wrap my mind around. If I can figure out how to work it, though, I'd like to eventually set up this journal so that folks have to register and login to comment, and perhaps even to read entries. I haven't decided on that yet--maybe I'd just have some entries behind a curtain, so to speak, with more generic comments about news items or comic strips or whatever viewable by the anonymous visitor. If there are specific features you do or don't want to see, now's the time to speak up. Any change is not imminent, but I'd at least like to have a pretty good idea of what I want to accomplish by the time I accumulate enough knowledge to make it happen.

And speaking of comic strips, today's (Friday's) Pearls Before Swine is kind of humorous. Not hilarious, but it did elicit a snort from me when I saw it this morning.

For those who haven't been keeping track, daylight saving time ends at 2 a.m. on Sunday. Don't forget to set your clock back one hour before you go to bed tomorrow night. That means you get to sleep an extra hour if that's how you choose to spend the time! It also means sunrise will now happen before I leave for work, and sunsets will soon take place before I get back to the apartment each evening. (Unless, of course, I can find something closer to work--see the earlier paragraph on this very topic.)

Upcoming events include my third sermonette (scheduled for next Sabbath), a holiday (apparently the ACF takes off for Veteran's Day--who knew?--and since Veteran's Day is on a Sunday, we'll be closed on Monday), and then two days off for Thanksgiving which will hopefully entail a trip up to Georgia if all goes as planned.

I'm still waiting for the release of the 2008 Scott Specialized Catalogue of U.S. Stamps and Covers. I'm thinking I ordered the 2007 edition right after the Feast last year, so this one must be going on sale later in the year for some reason. It's no biggie--I've done next to nothing with my stamp collection in the last couple of months. Finally got around to an album page update last weekend--that's something that quite frankly probably should have been done in September, but there were other things on my plate in the weeks leading up to the Feast. Have also fielded a couple of trading requests, the most recent one from Great Britain. Once that exchange is actually effected I will have traded stamps with collectors in seven different countries (Great Britain, Canada, Australia, Argentina, Chile, Norway, and of course the U.S.), all courtesy of Philosateleia. If only it were a fiscally rewarding venture...but oh well. It's kind of cool to be trading stamps with people in such far-flung places.

As long as we're on the subject of mail, I got a belated Feast gift from Rachel (thanks, Rachel!) today! It's a CD; haven't listened to it yet, but perhaps I'll post a review once I've had a chance to do so.

And on that note, I probably ought to see what I can rustle up in the way of some vegetables or a peanut butter and pineapple preserves (I'm serious--had no idea such a thing as pineapple preserves existed, but they're right tasty) sandwich before calling my folks. A pleasant Sabbath to all, and to all a good night.

posted at 7:37 pm | permalink | 1 comment

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