26 November 2001
Well, I had a lovely Thanksgiving, and a nice, relaxing long weekend, even if I did spend most of it playing the video game Karen gave me for my birthday. (I'd have played it even more than I did, but my wrist started aching. I think I'm going to need to get an actual mouse with left and right buttons before I finish this game.)
In any event, Thanksgiving dinner was wonderful, and my parents sent us home with plenty of turkey for Matt (who would protest that there is no such thing as "enough turkey", but it'll keep him in sandwiches for a couple of weeks, anyhow) and a couple of thick slices of ham for me to make mac 'n' cheese with.
We all ate ourselves silly (only Americans would come up with a holiday this focused on food) and spent the weekend eating leftovers. The pie's all gone now.
Friday, in response to an awful case of restlessness, Matt and I drove down to Yorktown to meet Colleen and Carl and play frisbee. Of course, by the time we got ourselves organized, it was only an hour before dark. It's just as well, though - Saturday morning my arm was sore from throwing. Which goes to show you just how pathetically out of shape I really am.
My laptop's DVD-ROM drive is broken. Again. But you'll be happy to know that it's not the same problem I was having before. This time, whenever I open the drive, the platform on which the laser is mounted slides from center to rim and back twice (you can see the laser platform when the drive is open) and when I put a CD in, the drive doesn't even spin up to try to mount the disc. If I have the disc in the drive when I boot, it's recognized and mounted and works just fine, but if I then take it out, I have to reboot to get another disc mounted.
However... The drive does the exact same bizarre behavior in Matt's Powerbook, so it's the drive itself that's broken. I should be able to call Apple and have them send me a replacement drive with no trouble at all - the only problem is getting through to Apple. Every time I called over the weekend, there was a hold time estimate of at least 20 minutes. If I'm going to be spending that kind of time on hold, I want to do it at the office, where I can put the phone on speaker while I wait for someone to get to me.
I seem to have the worst trouble with DVD-ROM drives... If Matt hadn't been using his for over a year now with no problems at all, I might be tempted to conclude that Apple's DVD-ROM drives, at least for the Powerbook, are defective. But it seems to be just me. I wonder what I'm doing wrong...
So I'm back at work today. I'm hoping it will be a slow kind of day, but I'm not counting on it. Matt is taking the day off - he was planning to take tomorrow off anyway, for his birthday, and realized that if he took today off as well, then it would amount to a six-day weekend; practically a mini-vacation!
It was awfully hard to climb out of bed this morning, though, with him all warm and sleepy-snuggly.
As his birthday present to himself, he's going tonight to see Battlefield Band in concert. Colleen and Carl and Kevin are going with him. I'm sure he'd be happy to have me along, but the awful truth is that I can't stand bagpipe music, no matter how well-played. It makes my teeth ache.
But that's all right. Him being gone will give me some time to wrap his birthday presents. (Which I should really try to remember to bring home from the office today.)
Today marks the beginning of the office's new "Internet Access Management" accounts, where we have to log in to use our browsers so they can track internet usage a little closer.
So far it looks like I only have to log in each time I fire up the browser, not for each page I go to. So it may very well be that the browser becomes something, like my e-mail program, that I fire up first thing in the morning, and leave open all day.
I wonder if their idiot tracking software will log that for me as minimal internet use (only one login per day) or maximum (eight or nine hours of use per day)? Ah, well, I guess we'll find out...
Word of the Day:
officious - 1: volunteering one's services where they are neither asked nor needed, meddlesome; 2: informal, unofficial
Song of the Day:
Tongue Tied (Red Dwarf)
Currently Reading:
- The Free Bards by Mercedes Lackey