I tilt at windmills—often.

A day in my mind is a day in Cervantes’s world of going after things that are different than perceived.

It always gets worse when I surround myself with people who are like-minded. Interacting with like-minded folk makes me think that we really can change the world, that we can shift the paradigm and turn the world on its ear.

Maybe we can.

Maybe we can’t.

It’d sure be fun to try.

Will we try? I don’t know if we’re that crazy.

I do know that we’re that pissed about it enough to give it a good, long think.

B: “Every time we talk about this, we get bolder.”

G: “One of these days, we’ll be dumb enough to try.”

M: “You mean smart enough to try.”

G: “Okay, both.”

If only I could, say, give up sleeping for the next year.

Wicked cool: DVD-burning technology that will burn a label onto the disc. [Hat-tip to Mark, who posted this on the RF.]

That’s just spifftacular.

B&N to offer unlimited WiFi to customers, allow vendor choice. [Hat tip to b2-blog.]

This is the type of thing that people will use. There’s certainly a clientele [notably, college students and musicians] that would hang out at a B&N and soak up their WiFi goodness. [If I ever moved to Nashville, that would probably be me, too.] Since it’s not a foot-in-the-door perk but a pay-as-you-go type, it is, as Business 2.0 notes, “a Wi-Fi business plan that makes sense”.

Kudos.

Crap.

I thought the laptop was just suffering from a bad power adapter.

I’m now 99% sure that it’s the motherboard that’s slowly dying.

:sigh: I guess I’m going to spend a little time tonight getting a desktop up and running.

… but I’m betting that, at the end of the week, I’ll be able to say, “I got more done this past weekend on the .net than I did at work this past week.”

Yep.

Campaign post-mortems are always interesting to read: the Washington Post’s coverage of what was wrong in the Dean campaign is certainly worth looking at.

I’m fully ready to read a Kerry post-mortem in December.

It’s just the first week in March, but already I’m thinking about where I might move.

Our lease is up at the end of July. [I thought for a while that it might be at the end of June, but I then remembered that I moved in mid-June, which means I paid a partial and started the 12-month lease on 1 July.] I know that I’m going to be without my present roommates when I move; I think Anthony will be moving in with that woman of his, and Leonard will be going off to Charlotte. [What I don't know is when Leonard finishes his degree. I know that he'll have to take some classes in the summer, but I don't know whether it'll be the full ten-week term or just one five-week term. L-Fred, you may feel free to comment when you read this if we don't cross paths today.]

Rick jokingly said, “You know, we have those two rooms upstairs …” Not only would that likely put a strain on an eight-year friendship [stop and think about how long that is, Rick ], but hey … a married couple doesn’t need me around to crimp their style.

I’ve been looking this morning at townhouses and condominiums for sale in this area. Now, if you’ve been following along for awhile, you’re going, “Didn’t you say that you counted out buying something this time last year?” Why yes, I did. But as this year has progressed, I have spent more time thinking about seminary and all that, and the more I think and pray about it, the more I realize that, for the next three or four years, my place is here in Huntsville. Interest rates are still way down, and there are several options very close to work [and further west in town, meaning that I won't feel like I'm driving half a day when I want to go see all my country-living friends].

Looking at the numbers, I could afford to live entirely by myself, if I chose. Would I like a roommate? Sure. Do I know anyone? No. Yes, for the first time in four or five years, I don’t have a list of people in mind to call up and ask about a place to crash. Shoot … the only name that does come to mind is one of my old roommates, but I don’t know how far along he is in school anymore.

The biggest reason to buy? It would be the last move that I’d make before leaving Huntsville. I know that I’m going to get jacked on rent rates at my present apartment complex; I got $100/mo. knocked off by taking advantage of a special when I moved in, and since they’ve changed a few things here [notably swapping water utilities], more things are now included in the rent. I see absolutely no reason to pay twice as much in rent as I could for someplace I could live, even if it’s just for a few years.

[Yes, if you're wondering, moving furniture yesterday got me thinking about moving again. I'd been subconsciously thinking about it for the last six weeks or so, but it made me vocalize it for the first time. Oi.]

It’s been a good day.

After sleeping until 11:00 a.m. [I didn't expect that!], I got a lot done on my redesign/reorganization of [caedmonscall.net]. I’m about a third done with the work of putting together the old rumors into a WordPress install. We’ve gone from a web root of 200+ files to only having some legacy files left.

Man, I love 301 redirects in .htaccess. They’re wonderful!

I capped the day off by helping the Granades move in their new couch and loveseat. [Yes, Rick and Jon were there, too ... but only because I'd "offered" their help. Juniors. ] I got to rectify a situation and go see Eli. What a cute kid.

Ten minutes from tip-off … GO DUKE! BEAT CAROLINA!

… about sinus-headache-induced insomnia, but then I remember that Misty and Stephen are getting far less sleep than I am.

Sure, I still want to complain. [And by posting, I am voicing that, even if I'm placing caveats within.]

Oh well … the sun is preparing to rise on a new day, one that finds this area relatively unscathed after a nasty bout of storms. Pretty much anytime we get above 70F before April, I begin to think that we’ll have tornado warnings. We did. Nothing ever touched down [so far as I know], but it did get ugly out west in the county where all of my friends seem to live. There was probably a fair amount of flash flooding, what with rain rates reaching five inches an hour. [The Shoals had received about eight inches of rain by the time I went to bed the first time.] But I shall escape to Sleepyland before the sun has a chance to rise and keep me up all day.

Misty, if you read this and comment, please feel free to share some story about King Eli keeping you up all night.

Misty and Stephen’s son will be a month old tomorrow, and have I seen the boy?

No.

:sigh:

That is all.

Sometimes, you take one for the team. We needed some data entry done, and my boss knew that I was the person for it. I type faster than anyone else in our group; I might give our departmental secretary a run for her money.

So today, I built a 1000+-line spreadsheet in a little under six hours.

Six hours by sixty minutes an hour is 360 minutes; I was running almost three lines a minute. Considering that I was typing part number, quantity, and nomenclature … well, that was a lot. Of course, I was using Excel, and I had a lot of the same part numbers [because "AL ALLOY" is considered a part number in the configuration list].

Still, it’s kinda freaky to think that I built an indentured parts list in Excel in that brief amount of time. Data entry, formatting, indenting [after all, this is an indentured parts list], and all that.

Amazing what a deadline will do for your productivity.

If someone tells me that there’s functionality for exporting Filemaker Pro to Excel, though, I’m going to maim them. [I was working from a printout, but if I'd had a softcopy and a converter, I would have been done in a third of the time.]

After picking up Sergei Gonchar, the B’s have now acquired Michael Nylander from the Crapitalls. I like this trade, especially as Nylander’s an UFA. I really like the B’s trying to make a push for the playoffs. A Cup would salve a significant amount of time lost next season … for me, anyway.

Thanks again, Heather, for passing another player to us.

If you’ve ever wondered of the origins of the term “the pros from Dover“, you may wonder no more:

The pros from Dover is an American slang term for outside consultants who are brought into a business to troubleshoot and solve problems. The term comes from the 1968 book M*A*S*H by Richard Hooker. In the book, the character Hawkeye is described as using the guise of being the pro from Dover to obtain free entrance to golf courses:

[Hawkeye] would walk confidently into a pro shop, smile, comment upon the nice condition of the course, explain that he was just passing through and that he was Joe, Dave or Jack Somebody, the pro from Dover. This resulted, about eight times out of ten, in an invitation to play for free. If forced into conversation, he became the pro from Dover, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, New Jersey, England, Ohio, Delaware, Tennessee, or Dover-Foxcroft, Maine, whichever seemed safest.

Later on in the book, when Hawkeye and fellow surgeon Trapper are called from Korea to Tokyo to perform surgery on a congressman’s son, the following exchange takes place:

‘All right,’ Trapper said. ‘Somebody trot out the latest pictures of this kid with the shell fragment in his chest.’
“No one moved.
“‘Snap it up!’ yelled Hawkeye. ‘We’re the pros from Dover, and the last pictures we saw must be forty-eight hours old by now.’

This latter exchange is repeated in the 1970 movie, but the term pros from Dover is not explained in the script. People who had seen the movie, but not read the book, started using the phrase to mean outside experts/consultants without understanding that Hawkeye was using the term facetiously, referring to an old con he used to run.

[Posted slightly in amusement, somewhat for information, and mainly to increase the PageRank of the page with the actual definition.]

I need to order a Vote, F*cker T-shirt.