I took the day off today (more about that later in the post), but in my random quest around the Internet in some ‘spare’ time, I have really found some real gems.

I’ve not laughed so hard for a long time. It all started with this blog post. This sort of thing is the stuff I love to do when I’m in the right mood. It’s usually not in person, though (although it has been before), but rather with telemarketers or the like. Although oddly enough we had some Jehovah’s Witnesses come to the house this afternoon and I briefly entertained the notion of answering the door naked. I’m pretty sure we’d be blacklisted for that. 🙂 Alas, I wasn’t quite in the right mood for that, so I behaved. For now.

The JW’s don’t usually come around when I’m at home (which bothers me none), so I was surprised by that. Not only that, but they’d not been by for some time (Beth was still pregnant the last time).

I love sarcasm. I also love to mess with people’s minds at times. not generally in that sort of ‘asshole’ like way, but rather in the way that makes one ask questions. Almost like planting the seed of doubt and watching it grow. Or just having plain old good clean fun not directed at anyone in particular but rather a situation. Take for example a doctor I ran into today who played a certain style of music while performing a procedure. He didn’t do it because he really likes that style, but rather because he knew someone else in the room very much didn’t like that style. That’s awesome. 🙂 But he’s a very cool and professional fellow at the same time. But knows how to have some fun at the same time.

It’s been a pretty long day today. I took the day off because it was somewhat necessary. Beth had a pretty straightforward and (for lack of better term) trivial procedure done today (it was on an outpatient basis to give an idea of the non-critical nature) that meant it was going to be difficult for her to deal with Kirstin much today. So it meant I needed to be primary caregiver today and not just playmate.

I don’t have any problem with that; it was kinda fun in a way. We got to spend some time together and just hang around. But it also does make for a bit of a long day — not just because of Kirstin, but the fact that I needed to do some things for Beth as well when we were all back home. Tomorrow should be back to normal (more or less), so I’ll be back at the mill and that will be okay. There are a few things I’d like to get done before the end of the week.

I have been tinkering with the website bit here and there for the last 36 hours or so. Most of the tinkering thus far has been working on a new logo/symbol (it’s currently in black and white), and the other has been in working on a color scheme for the primary site. And also brushing up on my CSS. I’m planning to do this without the use of HTML tables, which will be a first for me. It’s going to take a lot of tinkering to get the desired effect, but it should work out well I think. The only part related to this that I’ve not done before (at length) is related to the positioning of items, so that’s where the tinkering will come in to play. I’m hoping to start working on this sometime during the weekend as time allows.

Speaking of the weekend, I’m keeping my project list on the small order. I want and need to get the cistern cleaned up (there’s still a lot of old dirt and whatnot), which is one item. I also need to finish digging the hole for the sump basin. And ideally get the sump basin set and backfilled as much as possible with what rock I have on hand. I’ve currently got four cubic feet of rock, which probably won’t be quite enough, but I’m not sure yet. I didn’t want to buy too much rock (besides, I was running out of room when I bought what I got before) anyway. So we’ll start at this and see where we end up. I’m guessing right now that it’ll get me about 2/3 of the way.

I also want to do some more cleaning in the basement at some point in time (possibly this weekend). We’ll see.

I’ve been kinda annoyed this evening with my [primary] email. This afternoon I noticed that I was having some server trouble with the provider. About three hours later, service was restored, but I’ve noticed that my home-grown anti-spam functionality was broken. In that I’m receiving about 10x what has become the normal volume. So that’s annoying. I’m getting about 1000 messages, when I should be getting on the order of 75 in the same time period. Eesh.

So when I logged into the server this evening, I noticed that my redirecting business was out of order. I also checked up on my spam junk account (which I’d set up through crontab to automatically delete itself daily) and noticed that it’d not been removed for some time. It was up to 1.95GB of junk mail. I have no idea how long that took to accumulate, but that’s a lot of damn mail. So I manually removed the mailfile for now.

So one of my tomorrow projects will likely be to rebuild my redirections and also re-create the crontab entry to keep my spam file from getting that large again. So that kinda sucks, but it could be worse. I can deal with the extra email for a day or two.

And in a perfect world, I’ll be able to start some templates and stuff locally on my intranet here so I can get this redesign business on its way to becoming history. 🙂

So, I’m heading for bed now. Until next time…

Memory is like an orgasm. It’s a lot better if you don’t have to fake it. (Seymour Cray)

–MZ