January 28, 2006
My book arrived in the mail this week, but of course everyone's been sick, so I haven't had a chance to do much more than write my name on the bottom edge. Oh well.
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January 26, 2006
January 24, 2006
Web Zen brings us fundamentalists vs. show tunes: "If you all don’t lower your voices and cease calling me Satan, I will have to sing show tunes."
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I'm trying to write Mac apps in Common Lisp without spending any money. "Hello World" mostly eludes me at the moment. Why do I find myself with these aggravating, time consuming hobbies?
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I ask you this: What better way to combat wee-hour sleeplessness than to truck on into work and get a bunch of stuff done before everyone else starts to arrive and generate distractions? Turns out this is a terrible idea, because at some point between last summer, when my company was bought by a BigCo, and now, when I'm sitting like a chump in East Cambridge without access to my own office, the access card system must have been qualitatively altered; this never used to be a problem. My one consolation is that I can walk across the street to a vacant mall that contains a Dunkin Donuts (for coffee) and an Apple store (closed, but with Wi-Fi and a bench outside it) to stay warm. I'm forced to endure "hits" of the 1980's over the mall's P.A. system. What a pain in the ass.
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January 15, 2006
So Thom helpfully pointed out that the Borders web site actually had (more or less) added a feature that explicitly stated which stores had which books and in what number, so upon being informed that there was one copy at the store down the street I threw the whole family in the car and headed over to buy it. Of course it wasn't actually in stock, so I just ordered the damn thing from Amazon. Sigh.
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January 12, 2006
I decided that it was finally time to go buy a real paper version of a book I've been reading in pieces online, and went to the Barnes & Noble website to see if I might just drive five minutes up the street and grab a copy off the shelf. It appeared possible. I did not get a copy: the book was not on the shelf; the clerk I asked said, "Oh, the web site doesn't have the same stuff as the stores," which I presume to mean that Barnes & Noble has decided to ensure that the shopping experience they provide is even crappier than that at the exceptionally crowded Borders in the mall across the street from work, where buying books is an annoying exercise that is nevertheless fast due to the presence of kiosk-style computers that one can use to search the physical store for a particular title. The book is kind of expensive (or, if I can't find a copy, I suppose, free), but not as overpriced as music sold in stores. At any rate, that was a solid thirty minutes of my evening down the crapper, and I therefore have decided to declare myself pretty much all done going to physical stores that aren't within walking distance of either work or home. I may make exceptions for food or medicine. Maybe there's somewhere in Cambridge I can buy my book.
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January 07, 2006
A few minutes past noon the kid walked over to the minifridge and said, "Does Dad need a beer?" Hmmm. Mouths of babes and all...
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January 04, 2006
This space thanks Adam G. profusely for this: SpongeBob as Eddie. Unbelievably, I don't have even a single Iron Maiden CD in the house. (How can this be?) Plenty of Sponge Bob stuff, though.
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January 02, 2006
Two consecutive days of nothing holiday related except for taking down the Christmas tree. The mind reels. The heart sings. We're mostly not sick. The kid has been amazingly pleasant. Happy New Year.
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