“Your rent is 78 months overdue”
Where have I been, you ask? Working! Only this time I’ve been working at, like, my job, not at school. We are putting out a major new web site and it has been a frantic push to finish the job on time. By my calculations I worked 70 hours last week. It actually is more draining than final exams, which are rapidly approaching whether I like it or not.
I’ve decided that when food rots in the fridge, it’s very psychically damaging. When food goes bad, for me it’s more like a betrayal. I look in there, I see a never-touched bag of salad greens or box of strawberries that one time held such promise — I feel such disappointment, like my children, they desert me. It hurts. It also doesn’t help that Officially De-Trucked Country Boy Arnie continues to buy these items, thusly compounding my sorrow and anguish. There are two walleye filets in there. We were informed, he says, that they would last only two days. I attempted to hide my emotions, but an arch remark escaped my lips. The walleye lie there, stillborn, markers of what never would be.
Fortunately we are seeing “eye” to “eye” on other issues — take the Pet Shop Boys, for example. So I happen to think Fundamental (and remix album Fundamentalism!) are some of the best CDs ever released in the last hundred years. I purchased about $100 of import singles through the mail — some new stuff, some old stuff. Arnie liked Flamboyant so much he had to hear it twice! Fundamental is quite the album. The first single was I’m With Stupid, about the love relationship between G. W. Bush and Tony Blair; “No one understands me / where I’m coming from / why would I be with someone who’s obviously so dumb?” The other great lines are “fly across the ocean / just to let you get your way” and “Do we really have a relationship so special in your heart?” Everything on the album is good. Buy it.
In other news, I guess I realize what a computer dork I still am, and I like it. Just today I ran into somebody in the hallway who wanted to know if I still liked IT as much as law, and I wound up teaching her AJAX in a nutshell, and actually got all excited! I also ran across an old 3.2GB drive and thought I’d put it into my ancient Pentium II Linux beater box, Passaic. (All my hardware is named after Jersey places.) Well it turned out to be the hard drive I used in college, and I found all this awesome Win98 stuff on it. “You last defragmented this drive 2,528 day(s) ago.” It has the NeoPlanet browser installed and I’ve got the horrible “Active Desktop” running now. I’m using the old “baseball” theme with the swinging bat instead of the hourglass. After I upgraded it to IE 6 I was able to run Windows Update. I need to run 25 critical updates and there are 40 more patches!
This is nothing. Last week I also decided to drag the old beloved TRS-80 Model III out of the basement and I found some of the old programs — Android Nim, computer bridge, and even CompuServe, that you had to use with the 300 baud external modem (in ANS or ORIG mode, please). Even ORCH-90 is there. It is so awesome.
And finally, last week I was also elected President of the Board of Trustees of the Connextions Lofts Homeowners’ Association. I am elated to be serving the building in this capacity! I advanced a capital plan that outlines spending almost $50,000 in improvements for our building, which should really improve the appearance and value of the units here. And, I got to meet some of my neighbors including the person who bought the unit next door. It was a great time and I look forward to a great year.