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(accidentally deleted this during maintenance, reposting)

I stood under the narrow lintel of the office door, waiting to see if the rain would let up a bit… This morning’s forecast was “a chance of light rain”, so I left my lovely new umbrella at home. The outcome? Trapped in the office while streets flooded over the sidewalks, underpasses so deep in water that cars were wading through water over their axles if they made it at all.

While I waited I watched; there was a lake in the road from the yellow line to just above the level of the sidewalk, and I was immoderately amused by watching the pedestrians leap for cover every time a speeding car sent a tsunami up over the pavement.

Photo courtesy of a certain water-flinging, icecube-tossing partner in crime - why yes, it was a good night out, why do you ask?

I’ve been writing lots of posts lately, but only in my mind and never when I’m near a keyboard. When I am near a keyboard, I have work to do.

So.

1. Yes, I’m working, busting my butt with a handful of the usual suspects in a startup, a real one with funding and an actual honest-to-god customer. We’re at alpha 3 and aside from the usual crumbs in the bed, the product is looking pretty cool indeed. No, I’m not going to link to it or talk about it. But it’s COOL.

2. Sooo fat.

3. Got myself a KICKASS, let me repeat, KICK ASS pair of New Rock boots. They only arrived a couple of days ago and we haven’t gotten off to the best start, but once the blisters heal I think we will be very, very happy together. Yes, they are as heavy as they look. Heavier. And dangerous to those around me, as an unfortunate soul on the other side of the restaurant table discovered last night.

4. New laptop is great, the consort is great, the cats are great, yadda yadda.

5. A new camera is heading my way (eeeeeeeee! EEEEEE!), so I’ve been trying to get back into the picture-taking habit with the old one until this baby arrives, maybe sometime in the next month (it’s a gift so I’m waiting on hand delivery. As it’s a gift I can’t complain about waiting, although the giver of the gift is getting far too much enjoyment out of taunting me about the wait). I’ve put a couple of new photos up on Flickr, more to follow as I find myself increasingly using photoshop as stress therapy during crunches (this is a startup, it’s crunches all the way down).

6. Life is good. Aside from the intolerable fatness of being.

Reading: Peeling the Onion, by Günter Grass. Sumptuous, honest, lyrical. Grass at his best.
Watching: lots of Miyazaki, thanks to an Amazon gift certificate. Yay!
Playing: Killed the WoW account - I was playing because I was used to playing, not because I was having fun; three years is an awful long time to be doing the same thing over and over. Currently dabbling in Guild Wars, CoH/CoV, DDO. I like Guild Wars and DDO but haven’t had much time to devote to them; CoH/CoV I hadn’t played in four years, and really don’t feel myself being drawn back in. Bought Bioshock despite DRM annoyances; loved it but finished it in 25 hours (two days) and haven’t played again, though there really is a lot of replayability. Good game. I haven’t really found anything to engage me yet, so I’m still in the market for a good new game. Someone at EB Games recommended F.E.A.R. (his description of the AI was intriguing), which I picked up and will install when I have a free moment.
Listening: to everything. Curse iTunes for making it so easy to spend money on music!

To close, the single best riposte I’ve come up with all year. I’m so proud of myself:

Friend: I went to a single-sex school.
Bill: “Please sir, I can have some more?”

Friend: So you might be crazy?
Bill: My invisible dinosaur attorney advises me not to answer that question.

- iPod being replaced in toto, new one on its way from Shanghai now, bliss approaches.
- Luggage found, laundry washed, bliss.
- New laptop arrived while I was away, using it now, BLISS.

The new laptop is teh sex. That’s all I have to say.

And… um… well… I’ll just spit it out: I LIKE WINDOWS VISTA.
Confirm! Continue! Permit! Deny!: The permit/deny stuff is annoying, but it only comes up when I’m setting up programs or modifying things; in normal use it’s not really an issue. And there’s something to be said for knowing when anything on your system is trying to change.
Yellow OS needs food: It’s a resource hog, but I have a dual-core processor and ram out the wazoo and so far my CPU (as monitored on the pre-installed Google sidebar) is showing about as much activity as a granny dozing in a lawn chair.
Get out of my underwear drawer: I opted out of most information-sharing options where possible, but the OS came preinstalled so I didn’t have full control. I do note definite areas where info is being sent out - for example, the games tab, which cleverly and cooly noted every new game I added to the machine, has pictures of the product box and product details such as publisher/developer for every game I installed. This is hella cool, but also means that at some point my machine communicated what games I had installed in order to get that extra info. Privacy vs cool… some people will always love the extra, some people will always feel violated. I’m on the fence for now.

Altogether I’m having a better time with my Vista experience than I expected. I still have some reservations about information being shared, and worry a little about connectivity being thwarted for my own good, but so far so good.

… Although it’s not where my luggage is. Wheeee!

There’s no bedhead like airport bedhead.

Sleepover rating for Chicago O’Hare: 4/5. The seats are wide, flat, and adequately padded, allowing for sleep on both sides as well as the back, and the armrests leave enough room for legs to pass under for a full stretch. Props to Hudson Booksellers for the free tote bag with my purchase of three books: the three paperbacks, when placed in the tote bag, made a surprisingly comfortable pillow. General temperature was good, allowing for comfortable sleep in just the clothes I had with me.
The only negatives were the thick seams on the seat edges, which were noticeable where the seats were slightly misaligned. Might be some bruising there.
Overall, not the worst place to spend the night by a long shot.

I found myself a corner in a vacant gate waiting area, with the bonus of a good view of the outdoor electronic sign for the gate, which conveniently displays the time. A four-foot high wall clock! Being in a corner let me stash my bag where it was reasonably safe, i.e. anyone trying to fiddle with it would be conspicuously Where They Should Not Be, and as cleaning staff were constantly passing by I allowed my paranoia to subside enough to get a few hours of sleep.

I’m awake a little early, but I’d rather be tired than risk missing my flight home. Soon Starbucks will open for my caffeinating pleasure.

Fun fact: I picked up my Starbucks habit as a result of travelling. At home I avoided them like the plague, preferring local or at least Canadian coffeeshops; but in airports they’re a known quantity, and in the smaller american cities Starbucks is the only place to find a real cup of coffee (non-drip, by my standards).

Soon: home.

Me, I wished that I had more time between connections in Chicago so I could see a bit more of the airport. Well tadaah, flight delayed half an hour + connection time of half an hour means, yes, a missed connection. That flight was scheduled to leave at 8pm (9pm Montreal time), and the next is only at 6am. Whee. I got a hotel discount coupon but I don’t relish the idea of coming back to wrangle through security for a 6am flight, so I’ll be looking for some soft benches to sleep on.
I’m currently online by grace of Chicago O’Hare wifi, not too expensive thank goodness.

My iPod is broken, so no music.
My Blackberry has dead batteries, so no connectivity except for when I can find a plug for the laptop.
My headset is in my unavailable luggage so I can’t watch movies or listen to music on the laptop.
Tired and really really REALLY wanted to be home in my own bed tonight, been homesick for days.
Also started being sick yesterday and definitely have sinusitus today so not only do I get to spend the night in an airport, I get to do so with hot lava running down my throat.
Whee.
Sigh.

But… spent the morning at the tide pools in San Diego, which was awesome except for my camera’s batteries dying before the sun came out.
Had a good visit generally. I really like my replacement and regret that we only got to hang out for a week.
I went to LEGOLAND! YEAH! And then the security checkpoint guy at San Diego airport loved my lego Darth Vader shirt, pointing out that his name was “Starwars” - for real!

There’s probably more, but I’m beat. Off to find a comfy chair.

- Haven’t been exercising, fatter than ever.
- iPod broke. IPOD BROKEN! MUST HAVE AURAL CRACK COCAINE. After dancing through the byzantine self-help routes on the Apple site and after adventures in trying to find a local service provider - much walking to places with hours different than those posted on their websites, i.e. closed, and the great walking adventure to a nonexistent address - I ended up being told that iPods are handled only through the website. Oh, and I had the pleasure of being serviced by a Mac bigot, who was interested in trying to suss out the problem until I told him I was using Windows to synch, at which point he said, “Oh, then you have a virus” and handed the iPod back to me. Yeah, because it couldn’t be, say, a corrupted hard drive or anything like that, which was the conclusion of the very nice Apple service person I dealt with on the phone later that night. Now waiting for the package to mail it back to Apple, but it means that I will have no iPod when I travel next week because:
- Am still contracting to previous company, who have finally, some months later, hired someone to replace me (the entire function of my entire vanished department has been filled in the meantime by a lone, newly-hired tester who I have been aiding from the sidelines). I go back to California next week to train my replacement. One last week then I’m finally done with the old company. Free!
- Doing other interesting stuff, this and that. Some of which I’ll get paid for so that’s cool.
- Fricking heat waves. YUCK.
- Cut most of my hair off and dyed it red. Whee! Next: MORE RED.
- Buying an inordinately sexy new laptop, a Dell XPS M1710. Shipping only late next month because I’m finicky about my hard drive. Sigh. But SEXY NEW LAPTOP OMFG. And it should run WoW even better than my desktop. Muah-haha!