The Time Sink

I hadn't thought I was being all that prophetic Friday, but it was a virusy weekend in e-mail land... Normally I don't get all that many infected e-mails, likely because I not in that many people's contacts; but Sircam and the others that pull addresses from temporary internet files had a great time.

Since I handle all initial e-mail at home in K-mail, I usually just return a note to the infectee advising them of the problem and adding a link to whatever cleaning tool they need or to a web-based scanner. ...and then go kill the offending file from the Worldnet server. ...and warn Shelley again. ...and think about moving her to Linux.

At my current paranoia level, it wouldn't take much to put me over the edge. ...and for her, there'd be no big deal; her e-mail needs are easy to meet and she already uses WordPerfect. ...and I'm betting most of the sites she visits would work fine in Konqueror or even Netscape. Maybe a rebuild for Christmas...

...and I whined too soon yesterday! Some free time opened up in the early evening and Wolf's chassis is now sitting on the left desk. Yeah, I need a little more room to work, but it's a start...

Hmmm... I munged this up somehow last night, so let's try it again. I started off by saying this would be a most interesting post as I'm writing it in OpenOffice 6 (Build 638C). I figured since I use such a shotgun approach to learning things, I'd just skip over some steps and install and run OpenOffice rather than StarOffice. Well, I learned a thing or two during the install process; but since that went too easily (relative to later events), I figured ''What the heck''and loaded this page in.

The first thing that became real obvious was that a GenXer definitely had a hand in the programming: every time I typed ''What'', the auto complete finished the word as ''Whatever''... The second quick lesson was that my 'plain vanilla' HTML had been hijacked and tweaked. ...but not as horribly as Word mangles things, and I figured I'd try to post it as it stood. Then I did something...

I still haven't figured out what happened, but I ended up with a thoroughly trashed page. So I took a pass on things and went off to read for a while.

If you missed my HMTL adventure in the land of OpenOffice, yesterday's original post is here. Granted, what I did was a little unfair to OpenOffice, but I think things generally worked out okay. If I knew how to set the defaults, I'd likely have had my picture intact and the font in Verdana as I prefer. ...but considering that the page rendered well enough in both IE and Konqueror, I'll call it good. ...and start playing more with OpenOffice.

Oh, the reason I started that post so late (yeah, yeah; just listen): Monday night's edition of Trauma, Life in the ER on TLC was filmed locally last April. The segment included side footage of our rigs and crews, the crew from the helicopter, a ton of coverage of hospital staff, and coverage of the neurosurgeons who have my mother's case. Kinda' hard to miss that one. ...especially since Janeen had worked on getting most of the background street footage for the film crew. She kept coming into work tired in the morning, but with tales of shot setups and action footage from the night before.

I'm not sure any of us should bother with a post today... I mean, like, you know, I was really working hard last night not to run down to CompUSA at midnight to pick up my copies of XP. ...and I figure everyone who didn't make it there last night will be busy buying up every copy in sight today and running back to their homes and offices and installing them right away. So, what's the point of a post?

But then again, post we must, perhaps without the sarcasm. On to other things from the weird places I visit on the web: I haven't mentioned Don Armstrong from The Land Down Under lately; but I thought of him yesterday when I read about the ant problem... Man, if that gets as out of hand as it is here, I could see other people nearby having a problem getting certain imports. We have those little buggers locally and the farmers are trying everything short of nukes to clear them out.

At least this week is over... Bad enough the workplace sucked the life force out of me most of the days, but tonight the local team fell to Hawai'i after a three-hour plus battle.

A very full day here in the land of the Time Sink. ...as a matter of fact., I sank way too much time into things today and I don't seem to have any left over for here! ...and that's with the time change happening tonight.

Well, very simply, I ran myself into the ground prepping the outside for the first rain of the season. It was originally scheduled to arrive this evening and stay through Monday; then by Monday with a half inch forecast; now Monday maybe (evening for sure) with a quarter inch promised... So, we'll just see.

I did manage to get out and stretch my legs some blading this evening; that helped a bit. But I feel like I'm fighting off something, so it's time to flip the page and head off to bed.