During my commute, I’ve been listening to the audio book of On the Shores of Silver Lake one of the middle/later books in the Little House on the Prairie series…because I saw it at the library and I have a weakness for that series…I have the *entire* series (in mismatched paperback)…most of them are kind of old, were my mom’s before I was born, but all the missing additional books got filled in somewhere along the line (maybe in junior high?) and I used to love to read the series…though I haven’t read them in a long time now… kind of fun to re-read… very good descriptive writing of another time and place…and “how life was”, something I find fascinating 🙂 well, that and I just love biographies about everyday life. Anyway, I finished it today five minutes before I got home…so time to move on to my other audio book perhaps. Just thought it was worth nothing that it was fun to “read”…course now I want to jump back in and re-read the whole rest of the series…too bad the library didn’t have all of those in stock on audiobook…ahh well….hopefully I won’t need audiobooks and cds to entertain me for long drives to work for much longer…if only I had an adapter in my car that I could play ipod or mp3 cds or cassette tapes rather than just plain vanilla cds
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Taking the train
So for all the hassles involved in taking the train and the shuttle to work on friday…when Monday rolled around being tired of driving automatically trumps the added hassle factor. Decided to go with the 20 one-way trip pass partly because you save money (if you use it up) but partly moreso because then you have more slack time in the morning to catch your train on time without worrying about having to stand in line to buy a ticket and then running to get it punched for the ride before you get on…
On the plus side of the train, aside from not having to drive, there’s also a community aspect…its pretty much mostly the same people who ride the shuttle regularly…so already Monday, a couple of the people who ride the shuttle to work were recognizing me and saying “oh, hey you came back, cool” and I ran into one of them at lunch yesterday. Gives you a chance to get to know coworkers outside your department…who actually *come* to work (Sun’s kind of big on the coming into the office part as being optional as far as working goes…).
I probably would have taken the train again today if it weren’t a pseudo-holiday that a lot of people who work for the state get off work meaning light traffic…well, that and it turned out to be good because we had a staff meeting at 2:30 that lasted until 4:15…which meant I would have missed the shuttle home that I would have wanted to catch…and the later one wouldn’t get me home with enough time to eat dinner or anything before junior high ministry.
I’ll probably take the shuttle again one of the next two days. But I probably need to drive one more time this week because I was talking over email with a really nice sounding girl who has a room for rent in her two bedroom condo in palo alto, so I want to go take a look at the place and meet her so we can see whether that one is a keeper or not. Looking forward to having *something* decided as far as where and when I’ll be moving… 🙂
Ubiquity Trumps Policy
Quote of the day: “well intentioned standards bodies and departments of justice can do their best, but at the end of the day, volume deployment is the only setter of standards. Ubiquity trumps policy, just about every time.” -Johnathan Schwartz
In my observations, that certainly seems to be true, whether you’re talking about browser standards, cellphones, or something else entirely.
Thunderbird Can’t Disable Notifications Selectively???
I can’t believe Mozilla Thunderbird doesn’t have an option to selectively disable new mail notifications (ie: you are on a high volume mail list and set up a filter for those messages to redirect to a different folder…AND…don’t notify me I have new mail when those arrive). And you know what’s even lamer than the lack of support for that? A bug was filed in 1999 requesting to add that feature. And its now nearly 2009? And the feature still isn’t there but is sidelined into a pile of “maybe in our next major release…maybe…”? Lameness. That’s something I’d consider a relatively basic feature.
Anyone know any open-source-ish type imap-friendly email clients other than Thunderbird that would do a better job at this?
Ramping Up…
When I got to my office this morning my desk was streaked in sunlight, it just was so inviting.
And when I pulled the laptop back out it was able to successfully resume configuring itself, though it displayed some rather confusing looking messages like “administrator account disabled” that went away on their own…but the good news is the restore disks worked, it only took another hour of configuring and then I had a fresh clean vista system, and I got to be user Jessica instead of Lenovo User. It looks sooo much prettier in Vista.
So I got Netbeans and Thunderbird installed, and started doing some tutorials on Netbeans XML editing features. Kind of has some neat stuff there. S. (my officemate) got together a group of us from our team to each lunch in the cafeteria today. The cafeteria is just slightly smaller than the one in Santa Clara, but edible and all none the less.
Well, time to go eat dinner and be off…
Tomorrow the election will be over!
In Honor of Elections season…
We have a scan of an old Frank & Ernest strip:
A Photo of the Chef!
Attempting to make cheesecake for my mom’s birthday cake. The crust turned into a total disaster though, it wouldn’t stick together so it woudn’t pres into the pan. NOT using that recipe again.
Working on my website
Last night I worked on redoing the origami page on my website, to make it actually tell a story. To go with the story I scanned in a bunch of old photos and took a few new ones to go with them, though there’s a few I didn’t get to taking because I got tired and the camera battery was dead…but maybe later I’ll pull out the crane box from the top of the closet to take more pictures.
Dell Giftcard
I’ve been thinking for a while I better spend my dell giftcard that came with my laptop before it expires in the next couple months. So I finally got around to doing some shopping and ordering tonight. I ended up deciding to upgrade my laptop’s ram, get a properly-sized neoprene laptop sleeve, and a 2 gig usb memory stick…leaving less than 2 dollars unspent on my memory card after taxes and shipping and everything.
I was going to get a red memory stick, but it turns out pink was $2 cheaper for the same amount of memory, so I decided I could live with pink. I’m not sure exactly how that works, but I can roll with it. The sleeve was pink because, well, I’d been eying that pink sleeve since I got the laptop, but they didn’t have it in stock when I bought the laptop.