The last week has seen me:

* startle Neil Stephenson [1]
* have an annoying contact lens incident [2]
* apply the necessary teachable-moment to a kid outside my workplace who was messing around with my bike when I left the office
* meet Stewart Brand
* watch a superconducting toy train, a sort-of real quantum computer and a really pretty 3-d movie which was narrated by Stephen Hawking [3]
* document the activities of the zombies at City Hall. Well, the zombies attracted to City Hall by a certain video. This was surprisingly fun.
* play with a working reprap, a supposedly self-replicating machine. [4]
* be part of creating and solving various problems; technical, social; problems of planning and problems of execution. Be pleased with some outcomes. Be exhausted at work, but not too exhausted.
* see melted_snowball off on his trip to Japan. Missing him a lot.
* not get enough sleep. Not get the rounds of bugs that are sweeping my workplace. Now if I can just get my flu shots before I have any flu symptoms, I'll be even happier.
* feel simultaneously lonely and not like talking to people. Sometimes I wish I were wired to be more social.
* spending quality time with Rover.

[1] I saw Neil Stephenson speak twice last week; afterwards, I thanked him for providing fun role-models for geeky people everywhere. I offered that I was occasionally inspired by Sangemon, the "hero" of Zodiac, whose style of bicycling in Boston traffic was over-the-top assertive. Neil looked a bit nervous at this- "I hope you do that safely." I laughed. Anyway, he was very polite.

[2] on second thought, I won't describe it. Not fun. [5]

[3] The toy train zoomed around a magnetic track. The "train" contained a super-chilled magnet and it was propelled by a shove from the demo-guy. The "quantum computer" was very poorly explained by a volunteer docent but it had an oscilloscope readout with a squiggle. And a plexiglass and metal assembly. Sorry, but that's all I got. I found my favourite part of the video, animated by NCSA - flying from the western spiral arm to the center of our galaxy. This was the most effective use of 3D I've yet seen.

[4] This evening I went off to the local nascent "hack lab" (clubhouse for tinkerers, more or less). I brought my arduino and stepper-motor. But I spent a lot of the time there socializing, playing with other peoples' toys [6], and such. It's a cool space, and my life isn't compatible with spending much time there, but I'm glad to see it exists.

[5] but my optometrist's office is 5 minutes walk from my office; and they gave me a new lens to replace the one that was stuck in my eye. Oops, I wasn't going to describe it. Well there you go.

[6] the reprap was a surprise to see in person- by the end of the evening, it was working, and it did "print" a plastic part used to make itself. Re-reading reprap.org, I had forgotten they only produce 60% of their own parts- yes it's a toy, but it's a fairly cool toy.

I'm missing some stuff in this update, but that's what I get for not posting frequently enough.

Unclutterer reports that O'Reilly tech books has an ebook promotion for $4.99 per book you already own. This looks quite useful to me:

- O'Reilly ebooks come as a bundle of three common formats (mobi, pdf, epub)
- they are un-copyprotected, a.k.a. not locked to existing software/hardware readers
- while only a fraction of their books are currently available in ebook, some others are also available as pdf

To get the $4.99 books, you need to make an account on their site, register the ISBNs of your books, add them each to your cart, and use the 499UP discount code. I tested one book, and it appears to work.

I may just have to get busy with our barcode-reader at work, since that's where my O'Reilly books live now. I figure at least a dozen of my books are worth future-proofing in case I eventually buy a portable bookreader. :)

The arts event I went to this evening was... meh.

I slept instead of going to the Cory Doctorow talk. It was a good nap.

I had a funny idea that solves a problem at work. I want to start hacking WWW::Mechanize to make a proof of concept, but roverthedog is standing at the door staring at me and her eyes are saying, "You haven't given me a walk yet."

I shouldn't write this code, anyway; I should give it to my co-op.

Really I shouldn't.

OK, Rover, time for a walk!

There are moments I get, that the world is full of promise. Anything is possible.

In this one, I will attempt to re-join my LJ.

I've been following my friends-list for the last while, but one thing and another, I'd not had time to really figure out what I wanted to say in this space.

Over the last month, my overall mood has been grateful.

That's the main theme. There are sub-themes, including full of joy, awed, stressed, frustrated, and ow. And I could write a post about all of these, but I will instead try for a one-liner: joy at time with dan and with other friends; awe at wonderful theatre; stress from repercussions of having too much on my plate; frustration with "this should be easier"; and "ow" at my body. Each, a side-note to the main-theme of gratefulness- Life? It is good.

And I have been enjoying the nudging I've been getting (from friends, from God, from readings) that being grateful is a perfectly fine response.

It doesn't make for gripping reading, though; so let me tell you a story.

[oh geez, why did I write that? Now I've totally written myself into a corner, I haven't even come up with what story I'll tell.]

[Back from Quaker Meeting, a ride home with beartalon, and a bit of lunch...]

This story is about the future.

Last week at work I was emailing with the campus bookstore about their print-on-demand service. They have a book-printing machine, and I was curious if it was reasonable to print this for me. They quoted $50 setup, $19.95 to make the book. But, since I said that co-workers would probably want additional copies, he added they could waive the setup fee if they deemed the book worth keeping in their library. Sounded great; he'd talk to his boss; I'd get back to him when I needed the book...

On Thursday, when I was in the midst of finishing programming edits on this month's project, I got an email from the bookstore, "We've printed a sample. Come and take a look."

Oh. Oh no. As I told dawn_guy: that was so totally unfair, I didn't have time to do that, I had a million things to do.

So I was an adult, and kept fixing bugs, even though in the back of my head, there is a book that wasn't ordered on my behalf, it was printed and perfect-bound on my behalf, and it was just sitting there waiting for me to go collect it. So, ya, I'm a bit of a book nerd, and I wanted to go kick the book's tires.

Just before 5pm, I dropped by dawn_guy's office and said, "I need a walk. Wanna go down to the bookstore?" And we did. And the book machine was sitting there, and Sean showed me the sample he made, which was pretty much exactly like the PDF, a slightly oversize paperback book, with a black-and-white cover-page because we didn't give them a colour page to work from. And Dawn and I realized the bottom edge was off by a couple of millimeters, and he checked with a level and yup, the cutter had gotten a bit out of alignment. And I was craning my neck to get a better look at the machine behind the counter, so Sean asked me if I wanted to go back and look at it.

And he ran off a copy of Heart of Darkness while I was there, just to show how it works. And it looks more or less like the video- from when you press "print", it plunked out a book in less than five minutes. More or less indistinguishable from any paperback, except the colour cover felt warm, and not quite dry yet.

Which feels yet another step closer to Matter Compilers in various bits of science fiction.

As I remarked to Dawn, I have seen the future, and it is slightly tacky.

The book will serve well. It is a well-written manual (also published by O'Reilly Press) for the revision-control system called "Subversion". Which is why I made a bookmark last week to "Subversion Best Practices", a title that slightly disappointed peaceofpie when he saw what it really was. :)

It's been a while since I've made a proper update.

Last weekend's trip to Philadelphia was fairly intense. I have a lot of respect for the organizers of the workshop; they packed a lot into our 44 hours on-site at Pendle Hill, yet it didn't feel rushed or overloaded. We learned more about the nuts and bolts of leading Quaker Quest training workshops, worked in small groups on articulating our own paths with regard to Quaker outreach, and talked about how the group of 30 of us can make the overall project work more smoothly. In the balance, I feel just as strongly that this is a worthwhile project and a good place for me right now.

The only parts of the weekend which were bad-intense were entirely my doing, because sometimes I'm a space-cadet who loses things wot aren't clamped down. *sigh*

One high-point to the trip was meeting some really neat people, some even roughly my age, from all over North America; and reconnecting with other 'Quakes who I've gotten to know and respect more over the last few years.

Another high-point was being picked up at the airport by Carrie G., who introduced me to Alma, who's now 4 5 months old. We went downtown and met up with her partner, Kathleen, and we had some wonderful time together (with ice-cream, plus also really cute sleeping infant) It was great to catch up for an hour; an hour which I thought I'd lost when I missed my first flight- making the meeting even more sweet.

But that was my 48 hours in the Philly area.

And when I got back, dan made us a lobster dinner, because he has an inside scoop with our favourite fish place, and heard they had excellent cheap lobsters. Yummy surprise, that. Go, dan!

Work has been rewarding, for the most part- I'm dividing my time between three software-design projects, and right now the balance is good. One project involves integrating our department's inventory system with the campus DNS, to simplify provisioning new equipment and make less work on updates. Another involves properly synching SSH keys so (among other benefits) instructors can more easily access their course-accounts from off-campus. The third is an Engineering Computing project of doom, which may be able to massage data from across campus into one place, in the formats needed by faculty to apply for grants, prepare their annual activity reports, and a few other creeping features. It may succeed, or it may collapse into a pile of brittle sticks; given the non-standardized data provided (and required) by the different faculties. We'll see.

I've just passed the one-year mark from coming back to CS, and I still like my work, I still like my work environment. Quite a bit, actually. The end of this calendar year will be five years I'm on campus, or more than half my time since moving here. Wow. I hope I can keep being as valuable to the U as I feel like it's been to me.

What else?

I'm going to be trying acupuncture. I met with my physiotherapist last week over coffee, and she pointed me in the right direction. I'll schedule it just as finish as I finish with the next bit of travel in May. I will be sure to report back, since I know some of you are practitioners. (or practitionees?)

For my birthday (which is next Wednesday), melted_snowball and I are going to Nova Scotia. We're leaving on Tuesday, back the following Wednesday. I'm very much looking forward. The plans are: two nights in Halifax, one night in Baddeck, three nights on the north side of Cape Breton in Pleasant Bay, one night in Truro. d's been patient with my impulse to arrange EVERY LITTLE BIT TO SEE IN THE ENTIRE PROVINCE in just a week. And I'm... actually quite OK with dan's desired agenda of seeing a few sights, doing some road-tripping, eating some excellent food, taking some hikes, and mostly relaxing. (Relax? How's that work?... Heh. Anybody have any tips here? Is there a class I can take on it?... Um. Joking, I think.)

I won't have my laptop, so don't expect much from me next week, even if 3G from my phone happens to work. I'll be too busy eating seafood to post, anyway. :)

The following weekend we're off to Denver to see The Three Bears, and also Other People. Long-planned trip, finally happening. I've never been to Colorado!

And a week after, with a weekend at home again, I'm taking a 3-day Project Management course, way far away at the University's extension office just a few blocks from my house. It should be useful, and there will be two colleagues in the course to trade ideas with also.

I have been keeping up with my friends-list, even if I'm not posting or commenting much. I do appreciate hearing what's up with you all; you inspire me and also give me great stuff to think about; as well as grounding me a bit. So, thanks.

Don't ask yourself what the world needs.
Ask yourself what makes you come alive and then go do that.
Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.
- Howard Thurman

This Tuesday, I"m giving a talk on Getting Things Done and the GTD software I use. The talk needs a small amount of tweaking, yet.

[And here's the finished version. Thanks for all your help, folks. It was really useful.]

If you're the kind of person who would attend a (free, 45-minute talk) on GTD...

Wanna look at my slides and notes, and make suggestions about what is unclear?
There are speaker's notes; you have to click the little head icon in the lower-right corner.

Unfortunately, it needs a google login. If you don't want to do that, I stashed a powerpoint here. You can put comments on this post.

Comments before Monday noon are appreciated; especially if you find yourself tuning out after the first few slides. That's helpful to know. :)

Thanks.

I knocked 11 things off my to-do list today. Tracks tells me I did 25 in the last 24 hours.

Now I have *only one* that's overdue by more than a week, and it was due back in July.

All of these due-dates are self-imposed. Still, the two stalest items were a huge relief to finally do. (One was start a google group to restart a conversation about FGC and Queer Quakers, which I had promised to do in July; this is a huge relief to get underway again. The other was to remind a local service agency I have a pile of computer equipment I'd like to donate.)

In the last 24 hours I added something like 40 new items, though 1/3 of these were music I want to buy, reminders of things I'm waiting on, and a few "someday" items. And some aren't actionable yet, but I still wanted to note them.

This afternoon I went back through my last four months of daily journal, and turned as many of those into action-items as felt necessary. Before today, I hadn't twigged to the fact that I really should be going through that every week or so, according to the GTD model. And yes, it was freeing, to get them into one master-list.

I think there might be (at least) two kinds of successfully organized people: one sort who is reassured to have everything in their brain, and wouldn't want to trust any sort of external system; and the other who in the end is reassured to have it all down in front of them.

The second variety is the kind I am, and it's one reason why GTD clicks with me.

This feels fairly over-sharing, which is why I'm not actually talking more about what's on the lists (though I'm probably happy to share if you have questions).

I seem to have 23 LJ posts in the queue. I wonder how many of them will ever finish baking.

It was a good weekend.

Not too social, not to solitary.

I did some doing, did some thinking.

Plusses and minuses:

+ getting some human-interface issues thought out.
+ following a long chain of "what-if..." to come up with a good idea for an addition to software I use
+ making steps forward on a few non-work projects, with clear(er) next steps.
    -- ignoring one project for months
+ seeing 12 Angry Men with chezmax & the_infamous_j
    + great show
+ Art Walk- bought stained glass from quingawaga for the office
+ melted_snowball, just 'cause.
+ good Quaker Meeting. I spent some of the Meeting considering whether I'm still led to keep working on a project. The answer's "yes, but..."
- Public Library is closed until 1pm on Sundays. F, WT?
+ dim sum with bats22, melted_snowball, the_infamous_j & chezmax. 12 dishes was exactly right. (mmmm turnip-cake.)
+ bats22 as houseguest
+ afternoon watching melted_snowball & bats22 in the kitchen
    + apple pie
    + roast veggies and squash soup and excellent company
+ dog walk
    -/+ surprise hail?! Those were big pellets!
- wet hair on cold mornings
- waiting for MEC order to arrive

"It is good," a friend said recently, "to have wings."

This was in response to my suggestion I might wing the talk I was going to give to our work group. I was presenting on Tracks, the GTD workflow/time-management software I've used for the last two years.

I gave the talk today, and I winged a lot of it, because the network didn't work for my live demo.

So I got to give my 10 minutes of spiel about GTD, and then instead of giving a 5-minute walk-through of the nifty-keen software, I waved my hands and answered questions for ten minutes.

Which I feel OK about, but not great. One person who has GTD experience says I did a good job; which I'd like to believe, though I'd like to have had a shiny demo, too.

(I had prepared a backup for the slides, which I didn't need; I had a plan for a backup for the live demo, which turned out to not work on-the-wing.)

Meanwhile, our University has announced a hiring-freeze for the next six months, or until the economic lay of the land becomes clearer. Our group (about 23 people) is currently down two employees due to recent resignations, one which we were just about to begin interviewing for. I expect we'll be doing a bit of winging it. Elsewhere, there are faculty offers that won't go out for a year, because we're missing the spring hiring cycle.

But- this is relatively mild in comparison with being laid off, told to work extra hours for less pay, or discovering one's country has gone bankrupt. I know I've got wings.

This morning I brought Harold to Giilck Auto, a mom-and-pop shop I'd gotten a recommendation for at work. While I waited, he put our car on a lift and went over the three problems the dealer found (and now I have photos of the underside of our car.) He quoted a repair for just exactly 1/10 as much as the dealer wanted for "necessary repairs". (All four sway-bar links were bad, and they were what made the clunk sound I mentioned to the dealer.) While the control arms are separating, they should still be good for a while. And the brake and fuel lines aren't great but he sprayed them with oil to hopefully retard further salt damage.)

I will say this is quite a turnaround of fortunes from last night, when we were both feeling a bit sick about likely junking Harold over a bill just under the worth of the car. I like the dealer; they were good to us when our car was under warranty. (new car computer, new blower motor, and so on.) But yeah. Here's hoping the Giilck fix is good enough.

I also got myself a doctor's note for massage therapy, and a massage appointment. Yay benefits.

And I got a proof-of-concept program working that had me stymied for part of last week. PHP seems to have much worse tools than Perl for programmatically logging into websites. I;ve had to learn a bunch of libcURL by trial and error; my error last week was assuming it kept track of cookies automatically. But no. It's so annoyingly low-level. I have the feeling I will end up writing my own framework to act something like WWW::Automate. Though that looks like an annoyingly large job, and I'm not currently taking on extra large jobs for the fun of it.

Oh, and: some of these tetrapods are really pretty. I've seen photos of them before, and wondered what the hell they were. Now I know!

Having a photocopier at work which scans pages to email is pretty sweet.

I made peace with the document-feeder even though it turned the first page into an accordion.

Because when I turned the page the other way, it did fine, and it snapped through all twelve pages in... 45 seconds? And emailed the PDF to me before I could get back to my office. Zoom!

I'm sure you've been eagerly anticipating the day- evidence has been mounting, and we can finally announce:



From: Graphic Services
Subject: [Fwd: PDF proof of Daniel Allen]
Date: June 3, 2008 1:22:33 PM



---

In other news, i can has bizniz cards x 250 count.
Computing Technology Specialist, yup that's me.

"So, da_lj, what are you doing for your birthday?"

Today? I've been working on php and apache. And oh! This evening I run a committee meeting! Woo!

But on Friday, melted_snowball and I are meeting up in Toronto, for the "Cool Drummings" concert series. Friday evening we're seeing Minimalist Classics with works by Terry Riley, Steve Reich and John Cage. Performers include Patricia O'Callaghan, who I adore, and (this was surprising to learn just now) by Adrienne Clarkson, our former Governor General. And Saturday afternoon, Wired Percussion. My sweetie is awesome for finding out about these in time to get tickets. I'm looking forward to it!

Of all of the birthday greetings, probably my absolute favourite was a video-chat serenade by lee_ellen and flydi. I miss you guys! Not sure when we can get to Ithaca, but seeing you "live" was just super.

I can't wait to go in to work tomorrow. The stuff I'm working on is awesome. On Thursday I met with $boss for our second weekly meeting, which made me quite happy. He asked excellent questions, and we determined that my original task was actually subsidiary to a bigger task, which might make things much easier- and lo, I'm seeing about rewriting our (much maligned) inventory front-end. Rubber, meet road! I just need to get myself a decent PHP book, because I'm tired of learning PHP by experimentation. (Is there a standard dead-tree book everyone uses? Just curious.)

And on Friday, I spent a good chunk of the day essentially exit-interviewing a staff member who has been using this same inventory system for the last many years; I didn't expect our discussion to take two hours, but he had that many suggestions about things that would make the job easier (in the end, he suggested I might be automating him out of a job, which I had been thinking was the case, but that's not out of line what the facility wants to do as well). I spent some time transcribing notes and prioritizing changes, all 95 of them. Look at me! I'm a requirements engineer!

Dinner tonight was lobster, cooked by melted_snowball for his mom and for me. It was so good. And dawn_guy and catbear brought by a sugar pie that was so sweet I think I'm still on a sugar high. Hope I can sleep tonight. ;)

Is it sad that the thing I most want to remember about this weekend was the rather dramatic dream I had last night, in which I slew a scary dragon with a large spoon? (Thrown like a boomerang).

Hm. And I mostly forgot the dream until mid-afternoon, when I was walking on campus and a squirrel tried to hold its ground when I walked toward it on the path, and I thought to it, "You better watch out, I might have a spoon. Wait, what?..."

I sorted all of the electronics in the other closet in my study. I haven't decided whether I'm actually going to try and sell the small pile of sellables, or donate them to MCC Generations thrift store (dan suggests I could possibly get a hefty tax receipt for them). Selling stuff takes time. I remember when I was all gung-ho about ebay. Now I have a full-time job. And too little energy to work on too many things. Hm. (jeanne_d_arc, I hope to have something for you by the weekend; and I have to find a means to turn your Microsoft Publisher into a .pdf, since I'm not working on a Windows machine any more. Maybe I can find one at work...)

Hey, failing that: does anybody have easy access to Publisher and wouldn't mind turning around one or a few edits of a 20mb or so newsletter document some time in the next few weeks?...

Commuter happiness: they finally street-cleaned the bike lanes on part of my daily ride. It's only a few hundred meters each way, but it's been filled with crud and it's made me grumpy every time I have to swerve around the glass. I've apparently gone 80 miles / 128km in the first three weeks of bike-commuting season, including a few trips downtown. I should get my bike tuned, but I'm riding it too much to spare for a few days. My legs are starting to feel better about the extra exercise, though I still feel quite out of shape.

Office happiness is also mine. My office feels like home. I really did miss working for CS, in ways I keep rediscovering. I'm digging into maintaining some php code- and it's well written. Wonders never cease. I'll probably have more techie notes next week. All I'm really missing is a window (I wonder what it would take to bribe one of the local readers of this blog to plug my spare webcam into their computer, point it out the window, and save a still image to the web once a minute or so... I have a few candidates; once I make sure the webcam works.)

I got two emails which amuse me today. One was from me, eleven months ago. I said, "Subject: Renew (domain name) now, nitwit. Thanks, D."

The other was spam with the subject, "Listing of general practice physicians and 34 more specialties." My assumption was that they were trying to sell me the very valuable list of which Canadian doctors might be accepting patients. But no; it's a list of US doctors which they will spam on my behalf. Ick.

melted_snowball and I went to the new Marble Slab Creamery ice cream shop last night. Aside from the horrible work-flow the (brand new!) store demonstrated, it also showed off how to still make a profit even if they don't churn through many customers: quite tasty product, and amazingly high prices. Like, $6 a waffle-cone prices. With a half-off coupon, our cones were each $3.50 with tax. But: I will say they were tasty. And giant (too big). They mixed in the mixins of your choice while you wait. So I had chocolate/cherry ice cream with fresh strawberries and oreo bits. And it was yummy, but I had a hard time getting to sleep from stuffedness. Serves me right.

The life? It is good.

I was just cleaning my office phone. One of the buttons links me to the voice-dial directory. I apparently hit that, and the sound of me cleaning the phone sounded sufficiently like a name, and dimly through the earpiece I heard something like, "Do you wish to talk to Kim Chopper?"

Thanks but... not really.

My old office is just as I remember. Except it's missing a filing cabinet. Which could leave me room for a comfy chair, though I think that might be politically tricky since nobody else in CSCF has a comfy chair. *pout* (Murphy bed in file cabinet? Hmmm.)

I have a brand new iMac, with a wide-screen extra monitor (2x1680x1050 desktop yay), and I've got a project to start with, making improvements to the department's DHCP services. Also: I have coworkers! They make geeky jokes and are glad to see me!

It's good to be back.

Challenges on day one: my work calendar (Oracle Calendar) isn't compatible with gmail calendar, iCal.app, or my phone. [ETA: maybe. I can manually import/export .ical files, and maybe there's a way to subscribe to Oracle's data. But probably not.]

My personal task-tracking system isn't compatible with the hacked-up version of RT we use. I have no idea how I should record my work tasks, since our RT isn't exactly compatible with the "Getting Things Done" method of making a new item for everything that will take longer than a few minutes.

Should I buy "I'm going away" doughnuts for the four coworkers in my area?

Monday is semi-officially my last day, and I don't start in CS until the 28th. Although I'm not sure how I managed to swing it, I am fairly happy about two weeks unpaid vacation. What should I do in it? I might visit my folks, though I did just see them, and I don't want to leave dan without a car, since he is in fact NOT going to China next week.)

---

I've got the head-cold I got rid of before I went to NYC (three countries ago, four if you count home). It seems to have lodged partly in my ears this time, which just sucked yesterday on the plane. The ears are mostly OK now, as are my sinuses partly, but I'm feeling really slow. Bleh.

---

A last bit of suckiness: Windows, why do you do this?

Finding programs on your All Programs menu can become difficult if you have a lot of programs installed. When you install new programs, Microsoft Windows XP adds each new item to the end of the All Programs menu. You can, however, quickly sort the items on your All Programs menu in alphabetical order.

[three-click instructions to sort alphabetically]

That's it—your programs are instantly alphabetized. Enjoy your newly organized All Programs menu.

[... Y]ou'll probably need to go back periodically and sort the lists again, because Windows XP doesn't automatically keep the list in alphabetical order.

Gee, I can't think of any reason that would be useful- partly alpha, partly installation-order. And you can't go back to installation-order either, which could be useful. Talk about lazy UI design.

...Did I mention how happy I am that my next work computer's gonna be a Mac?

(Via a comment in sqrt_joy's journal)

What have I learned today? (By "today" I mean Saturday, technically from midnight to midnight).

* My 15+ year old Converse hightops are still in good shape and comfortable. I dug them out to go dancing to 80s music with thefateyouare, chezmax, and indigofire_net; and my feet didn't hurt after two hours- wow. Why did I ever stop wearing them?

* I still enjoy dancing. I'm less self-conscious a dancer than I was the last time I was in a club, whenever the hell that was. (2000? Underworld in Boston?) (Is that claim sensible, or is it wishful thinking? Well, I know that last night I was indeed dancing like nobody was watching... Yay self-confidence?)

* The navy jacket which my Mom bought me in 1990, and which has sat in my closet for 15+ years since it's not appropriate for dinner-wear or other semiformal purposes, by virtue of ill fit and ugly buttons, still fits well enough for dancing, looks fairly snappy, and as a bonus, the inside breast pocket fits a water-bottle.

* The local production of The Importance of Being Earnest is worth seeing (it also runs the 10th-12th).

* As much as I wish Home Hardware were open after 5:30pm on Saturday, it ain't.

* That my new boss bought me a nice new computer for when I start my new job at the end of the month. Mmmmmm, brand new iMac with 2g memory...

* That our lawn possibly still exists, and might be visible in another week of warm weather like this.

* And I learned that our new back-yard neighbours are German and have not one but two small humans in the house.

What did you learn today?