Since I had no computer with which to amuse myself last night, I watched Ocean's Eleven. I've been wanting to see it again for a couple of weeks. It's a fun movie. And it invariably makes me want to play with the Scum.

Matt got a GMail account! Whoo! He's promised that I'm first on the list for an invite, as soon as he gets some. Of course, no one seems to really know how the invites work - do you get them after you've been in the system a certain length of time? After you've used it a certain amount?

He fired up the PC last night so I could take a look. It's not especially impressive to look at, though - like Google, it's clean and simple, with very few graphics and not a lot of clutter.

I'm a little dubious about their suggested usage system, but I'm looking forward to playing with it, anyway.

I was trying to decide whether I should try to get an account name that reflects my real name, or something more like a handle.

I think I'm decided on a "real-name" account, if I can find one that's reasonable. I've got a handle address, at MyWay, and I was even lucky enough to get the handle I wanted. My GMail account would be my second (active) online email account, so having one handle and one real-name account would be good, I think.

Hrmph. Apple's website says they've shipped everything but my computer. Bah!

And they don't estimate that the computer will ship until next Wednesday. BAH!

On the other hand, this will prepare me for dealing with FedEx. I'd have chosen another carrier if I could have, but you don't get a choice. I did, this time, remember to make my company name a part of the address label, though, so I guess we'll see if that's sufficient to actually get the box delivered to me without having to go through a lot of hassle.

I hate FedEx.

I actually got some official recognition from the company yesterday, for my work on the Project of Hate and the Spreadsheet of Doom. Me, and three other people who've put in some crazy hours on that stupid spreadsheet.

The manager for the project has ordered for the four of us some presents from the company store - a logo'ed fleece blanket and a logo'ed leatherman-like tool thingy. (The joke, you see, is that the blanket will be useful as we work long nights in the future on the Spreadsheet of Doom, and the tool thingy could be useful in prying necessary data out of our co-workers.) And an official letter of commendation will be placed in my HR files, and CC'ed to my immediate supervisor.

I'm just astonished that they recognized me. See, this project spans four different offices, each with their own Spreadsheet of Doom which has to be periodically filled in and sent up to the corporate office. And I'm not the official contact in our office for this. My ex-supervisor is. I'm just his alternate.

But I have been doing the vast majority of the work on our Spreadsheet of Doom, cleaning it up and trying to interpret the requirements and tracking down the data and making copies and entering it all in the spreadsheet and... like that. It's nice to know that someone a little farther up the chain actually knows that.

--Liz