09-24-06_1650.jpg

Originally uploaded by fallingrock.

This picture was taken (with my phone) at Steve’s new house (in progress) … clearly she’s planning on getting a walk-on part for a Doctor Who episode.

Well good evening all.

It’s around 11:45 at night and I just got inside after doing a micro-photosafari outside in the snow.

As I was getting ready for bed, I looked out the window and saw that it was still fairly bright (due to the light reflecting off the snow)… and the snow was fairly undisturbed … so I thought it would be a good idea to try and get some pictures.

Unforunately, the light started to fade … but I got some interesting pictures of the street and the trees near our house.

Hopefully we’ll get out tomorrow and do some more when the light is better.

… and this time I don’t mean SPAM.

I mean real, honest to goodness, junk postal mail.

I really don’t understand where some of the companies are getting their mailing lists… because I’ve been getting an increasing amount of junk mail sent to the post office box that I use for internet business.

The funny thing about it is that the people who are getting the majority of the junk mail have no direct affiliation with any of my net presences.

A few months ago I received a BankOne credit card offer addressed to: Anne Lucas, Midrange Dot Com, P.O. Box xxxxx, Hoffman Estates, IL xxxxx-xxxx. The company & address are (sort of) legitimate … but Anne, although a participant in a number of my midrange.com mailing lists, is NOT directly affiliated.

Today I received a similar piece of junk mail addressed to Leif Svalgaard from Forbes Magazine. Once again, Leif is a participant in a number of my mailing lists, but he has no official affiliation with midrange.com.

I suspect that some mailing list company is scouring the web looking for names that figure prominently in sites, looking up the whois information for the domain, and sticking the two bits of information together.

If any companies that purchase mailing lists happen across this post, I would suggest you take a long hard look at your providers to make sure they are not selling you junk.

I think Google’s GMail service is out of beta.

I just logged in to my gmail account and found I had 50 invites available to give out.

Leave a comment if you would like one … but don’t be greedy.

I just ordered a pizza online for the very first time.

Both Ginny and I had pretty rough days … and I was kind wiped out from my workout, so we decided to order a pizza from Johnny D’s KoKo Café.

We’ve ordered from them before and like their pizza … but we’ve always ordered on the phone. Today I decided to try their online ordering.

It was pretty slick … although it didn’t work in Firefox, which was annoying. I’ve been very successful at being IE free for a long time.

Tomorrow I’m back to work again … it’s been a fairly nice week off, although I didn’t get everything done that I had wanted to.

1. Run system shutdown test on server. This took me about 4 hours to do because there really isn’t a way to simulate a system shutdown without actually shutting down the system. Luckily the software behaved exactly the way it’s supposed to.
2. Work on slides for server training session.
3. Empty drawers and put paperwork in filing cabinet.
4. Clean-up basement.
5. Write program / script to scrub remaining email addresses from archives.
6. Work on prototype web app for Implementer

Of course a few unplanned items came up …

1. Major back spasm that seriously effected my mobility. I don’t know what caused it … they are usually caused by stress, but I’m on holiday right now. Maybe I’m getting stressed out about going back to work? Of course, right now, the only thing that’s giving me stress is my back pain.
2. Tivo going wonky … see previous post.
3. New hard drive & DVD-RW for my laptop arriving. This is where I learned that it’s not a good idea to leave the original laptop drive in the removable drive bay when you boot up the new drive. System gets kind of confused and screws up the new drive. Luckily it doesn’t effect the original drive, so I was able to re-image the new drive.

Well, not really.

Ok, Kinda really.

I gotta be honest here … I’m done with the holiday season around December 1st of every year.

It’s not that I don’t like the holidays … I’m just fed up with all the paraphernalia (not the right word, but I can’t think of it right now) that goes with it. ..

1. The constant holiday music … I’m not talking about encountering the occasional caroler … I’m talking about the CONSTANT music that plays in the lobby of our (new) office building. Every time I go outside our suite the same music is playing. And it’s not just our office … stores, banks, etc.
2. Holiday decorations … and the people who go WAY overboard. Just peruse Ginny’s blog to see about some of the houses in our neighborhood (of course this doesn’t just apply to the winter holidays … there are some houses in our neighborhood that always have some sort of decoration up).
3. Retailers #1 … and the incredible lines that can form just getting into BestBuy, CompUSA, Sears, and the like. If it hadn’t been for amazon.com I would have probably gone insane years ago. This year Ginny and I got smart when it came to gifts for the kids in the family … we got them all Barnes & Noble gift cards. This way they can get themselves a book, CD, DVD , or some other neat item that B&N carries. So much easier than trying to figure out what they would like.
4. Retailers #2 … why do the retailers have to start setting up their winter holiday displays before Halloween? One of these years I expect them to take down the winter holiday displays January 1st … and start setting them up again February 1st.

Ok, I’ve gotten that off my chest … for now.

… at least according to my brother Mitch 🙂

He went over to Fry’s the other day for the very first time. Suffice it to say, he was impressed.

A few minutes ago I moved the laundry from the washer to the dryer … after I started the dryer I noticed a thunking noise. Usually this means some coins were left in a pocket and was rattling around in the dryer.

So I fished around in the dryer to find the rattling items … and I found a compact flash memory card. It apparently had been left in a pocket after one of our photo expeditions.

Considering it had been washed I figured it was toast. Scratch one Lexar 256mb 40x CF card 🙁 .

Just for grins, however, I decided to put it in the reader to see if anything was recoverable. Lo-and-behold … the card appears to be working fine. Even chkdsk reports everything OK.

Cool.