I started putting ads on my site for google adsense on January 29th. So it’s been a month.

How has this trial period gone?

I’ve made $24.62.

It’s not going to allow me to buy a shiney new BMW, but it’s money I didn’t need to work for. Yay free money!

Over the past year or so I’ve been tuning into WYBE every Saturday night at 11pm to watch Dr. Who. I looked forward to this, since I had only seen bits and pieces of different seasons and this gave me the chance to see them all.

When I tuned in last night they had bad news for me. They had been running Dr. Who for 5 years (“Over 500 episodes!”) and were shelving it. Next week they’ll be playing another British SciFi show: Red Dwarf.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love Red Dwarf, but I’ve seen them, and I own all but seasons 3 and 4. They’re taking away The Doctor and replacing it with a show I’ve seen! Arg! Big meanies %(

Yesterday Michael spent the day doing taxes and other paperwork, so I did some reading. I finished M.Y.T.H. Inc. in Action, and then discovered that there are 2 books between that one and the one I’m borrowing from some friends! Oh no! So now I’m on a quest to find Sweet Myth-Tery of Life and Myth-Ion Improbable so I can finally get started on the book I’m borrowing, Something M.Y.T.H. Inc.. I also found out that there are more NEW Myth books! Myth Told Tales, released in May 2003, Myth-Alliances, released in August 2003, and Myth-taken Identity, which was just released this past September (full list of Myth books here). He now has a co-author, Jody Lynn Nye, and the reviews seem relatively mixed… for the latest one people are really complaining. On the whole I think it’s good though, I love this series and was sad when I thought I was coming near the end of it.

Anyway, I started reading Dragonflight, the first of the Dragonriders of Pern trilogy. My sister Heather was really into this series, and my friend was always telling me I should read some Anne McCaffrey. I’m about 100 pages into it, and it’s good so far, even if it took some time to get into. I don’t know much dragon-lore, and all the terms she used were new to me. I found myself flipping back to the glossery half a dozen times in the first five pages so I could understand what they people were talking about. But it’s all good, I tend to like it better when you’re dropped into the story and not having everything dryly explained (as long as it’s not *too* hard to keep up with terms).

And I’m close to finishing Heinlein’s Time Enough For Love. It’s been very difficult to get through, I’ve been poking at it since August, and after page 200 I’ve just been dreadfully bored. The first parts really gave me things to think about, what if you could live 2000 years? How much differently would you view the world in that time? How wise would you really become? How would you handle the loss of people in your life dying because they don’t live as long as you? But then the book sorta degenerated into being all about Heinlein’s views toward sex and relationships. Sometimes plot would come back strong, but then another woman would enter the story and it’d be all about sex again. I don’t have a problem with books that talk about sex (as long as it doesn’t turn into a bad romance novel) but I KNOW what Heinlein’s views on sex are (open relationships are good, sex is fun and not shameful), and being beat over the head with them over and over again in a book like this just gets dull. I still like Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land was amazing, Friday was fun, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was just great scifi), hopefully the next book of his that I choose to pick up will be better.

I spent some time today going over my techie resume, which is separate from my normal resume these days. I hadn’t updated it in a while since I hadn’t been looking into web development positions lately, but it’s good to have it dusted off for the interview tomorrow (which I’m less nervous about now).

Tonight we’re going over to Michael’s mother’s place, she needs help with her computer and said she’d feed us, yay I don’t need to co
ok tonight!

I’ve sent out some globals on Xelium, but I thought I’d mention it here on my livejournal too. Xelium is having a “contest” to decide the new design for the website. The current website is here:

http://network.xelium.net

The design is great, but it’s old and not expandable. So we’re doing a complete overhaul and looking for a designer.

Winner gets a vhost on Xelium and of course credit for the design, with a link to their site in the footer.

More details here: http://network.xelium.net/contest.php

The woman who is training me at work recommended that I bring in a cdplayer/radio to listen to while working, she told me it made the day go by quicker. So the next day I brought in a discman and some old headphones.

OK, so they weren’t headphones, they are “earbuds” and I haven’t a clue how old these things are. They’re Michael’s, I found them in a box while we were living at the apartment, I used to take the discman with me on walks and the earbuds worked nicely back then.

When I got to work I discovered that the right input doesn’t work (no doubt due to the exposed wire on that side which I patched up with electrical tape), but that’s fine since we work with only one in our ear anyway so we can be somewhat alert to what’s going on around us. And the soft stuff on the buds is gone, no big deal.

All week I’ve been saying to myself “Gosh, I should pick up some new ones.”

But we haven’t been anywhere near a store that would sell such a thing, and I didn’t think about it much because these worked good enough for now.

Until today.

I was listening to a Bjork CD and it sounded like it was skipping. I’ve had this CD for a long time, so I sighed and assumed it was going bad. I took it out of the player, and put in and old All About Eve CD. It skipped. Wait? Is that skipping? Nope, it was the sound… my earbuds were dying! I moved the wires around, tilted my head, twisted the wires, played with them for about 20 minutes but the sound problems were just getting worse. Eventually I gave up, it was annoying and wasting my time. It was 11:30.

So now I’m working from 11:30-5 without any music! It wasn’t so bad the first day I was here without music, but now that I’m used to it it’s making my day crawl. It doesn’t help that work today is slow, so the day would be going slowly anyway.

What sort of music do I listen to at work anyway? I brought in quite an assortment last week, trying to find what would amuse me most. Turns out that “chick music” puts me in the proper mood, who knew? Bjork, Ani DiFranco, All About Eve, Jewel, and even Alanis Morissette (post Jagged Little Pill). It’s funny because I hadn’t listened many of these songs in a very long time (with the exception of Bjork). I’d put this whole pile of CDs to a “chick music I outgrew when I graduated high school” pile.

Well, lunch break is almost over, hopefully they’ve found something for me to work on all afternoon.

Today the office soundscape is full of sneezing, coughing and people blowing their nose. I guess that means a cold is starting to go around *sigh* That’s no good. *barricades self in cubicle*

It’s started snowing. They are were 3-5 inches by this evening, but so far it’s not sticking. I guess this means we don’t get to go home early, bummer. The ride home is going to be awful though, people around here go crazier with driving when there are flurries.

Thus far my time management scheme is going well. It’s amazing how something simple like writing a list of things I needed to get done has helped, I can just take a look at the list and see what I feel like working on. Last night I began pulling together a Xelium website for an upcoming contest we’re having, and it looks nice so far.

Gosh. I can’t think of more to write.

I was at the grocery store recently looking for some handsoap. SoftSoap has this “Rainforest” line of soaps: http://www.softsoap.ca/english/brands/rainforest.shtml. This consists of 3 animals, a monkey, a parrot, and a panda.

Wait, a panda?

Let’s consult wikipedia:

The Giant Panda lives in mountainous regions, like Sichuan and Tibet.

I’m going to ask The Smithsonian Zoo:

Giant pandas … live in temperate-zone bamboo forests in central China.

Let’s see what the WWF says, a panda IS their mascot, they should know:

today giant pandas are confined to temperate forest scattered across six mountain ranges in southwestern China

So what are pandas doing in a Rainforest collection? Is this company especially stupid or is it a common misconception that pandas live in rainforests?

The rainforest has more interesting animals than any other habitat I know of, and they choose an animal that isn’t even in it!

The worst part? This is soap for kids. This teaches our kids that pandas live in rainforests.

*puts head on desk and groans*

I put the salad dressing on my salad when I made it up this morning, by lunchtime it was all soggy. Doh.

Yesterday I woke up and there was 3 inches of snow on the ground. Ack. Because of the horrible roads and lousy road crews in this area I ended up calling work and saying I wouldn’t be in. They were fine with it, a bunch of people didn’t come in because of the snow. So I had an extra day to my weekend *joy*

It was yucky snow, I went outside and shoveled before Michael woke up, gosh that stuff was heavy! It’s just too warm and the snow was melty-slushy. It’s February, the snow shouldn’t be melting so fast.

I spent the better part of the morning doing email and stuff with wallaceandgromit.net (the news is pouring in already and the movie release is still over 7 months away!).

Later I spent some time on our internal phone book website, which is coming along nicely.

In the afternoon I started playing around with the script that will pull URLs from #13thHour. I said I might want to do it in bash scripting (because I want to learn more), but after talking to a few people they told me I’d be much better off doing it with Perl. I’m torn between having it be a script that is part of R2D2, which instantly updates an RSS feed with URLs when they are posted, or having it as an external perl script that’s run once a day. There are pros an cons to each method.

I also spent some time with the rest of the Xelium admin staff pulling together plans for the upcoming site overhaul. We’ve been talking about this for months but keep getting distracted/busy with other things. I think this time we’re actually getting somewhere.

In the late afternoon Michael decided to go into work to do some things he couldn’t do while people are at the office, he said he’d be back late. So I started talking to b2s who wanted to “do something.” We ended up going out to grab some Mexican food and went back at b2s and ‘s place to watch some episodes of Creature Comforts that they had recorded from Comedy Central. I got home around 10 and went to bed, I was tired.

And today I’m at work. We should probably go grocery shopping tonight, having just salad to eat for lunch is no fun.

I’ve been sick these past few days.

It started on Thursday night, diarrhea, YUCK! I went to bed early because my stomach was feeling awful.

Friday I went into work, wasn’t feeling the greatest and let my boss know I might not feel up to staying the whole day. I felt ok all day, and stayed until 5. Michael picked me up and we headed over to ‘s place for movie night. I had a beer and some pizza, and my stomach didn’t protest too much, so I thought I was all better.

Saturday morning I woke up dehydrated with diarrhea AGAIN. Throughout the day I was taking ImmodiumAD and trying to make myself feel better because we had plans with some friends in the evening. So I kept telling myself I’d be fine and we could still go out with friends, but after lunch I didn’t feel so good, and after dinner I just felt awful. We had to cancel our plans.

So yesterday evening was the worst of it. I on my computer and my stomach was killing me, so I went downstairs to watch some tv, lying down hurt, sitting up hurt a little less. I finally broke down and took some Advil, which I had been reluctant to take before because it can be hard on the stomach. Eventually that made me feel good enough to go to sleep.

I hate when my body gets all broken like this! Apparently it’s one strain of the latest flu going around… which I hadn’t been directly exposed to, Michael had (and he’s fine!).

But this morning I feel better. Not quite 100% yet, but close to it.

When I wasn’t feeling miserable yesterday I was able to spend some time working on our internal phonebook. Michael found the old database for our previous phonebook, and I was able to dig up the PHP files. What a mess those php files were! And no formatting! But they worked, and I spent some time putting together CSS and making the pages look nicer. It’s functional now, but there are still some things I’d like to work on with it.

And today… we don’t have plans, at least I’m feeling better.

As I mentioned in a previous entry I want to start managing my time better so I can work on projects. My first step has been compiling a list of projects I want to work on, and I did that this week.

• Write new Address Book for internal use. This would be something running on our home apache server, only accessible from the network. Using PHP and MySQL it’ll have a place to display and sorts addresses, as well as edit the entries. I’ve written one in the past, but it was ugly and didn’t have as much functionality as I wanted.
• Write a “gallery” creation script. I know there are a zillion out there, but I want my own with all the perfect settings. I feed in high res pictures from my camera, it creates large, small and thumbnail images, then puts together a skeletal html page that displays them. I’ll write this in perl or bash scripting.
• Redo the #13thHour site. Some content is out-dated and I’ve had that same design for years. I want to redo the members section completely (surveys are lame) and all the quote pages are old… I probably don’t have time to put together a new quotes page, but I’ll send logs to any #13thHour people who wants to… volunteers?
• Redo Xelium site. This has been a project I’ve wanted to work on for months, but it just hasn’t gotten off the ground, each time we get together to plan things and start we all end up getting busy and the idea rots. We need to really start this someday.
• Improve CSS on princessleia.com. I want write up different CSS “Themes” for different holidays and seasons, so it’s not hard to do (I never even got around to making a V-Day theme this year!).
• #13thHour URLs page. I thought this up last night at movie night when mentioned yet again that he never clicks the links posted in channel. I could write a script to go through R2D2’s logs and grabs urls (and possibly the date and time they were said, but grabbing the date would require some script-foo). Then either put it on the #13thHour site as an RSS feed (optimal, but would require date grabbing) or as a plain html page. I’d tackle this with perl or bash scripting.
• Continue with my OS Experimentation on R2Q5. I want to try an Ubuntu install, a regular debian unstable or testing install, OS Warp 2 install.

I also want to get further into a few excellent computer books I have.

• The CSS Anthology: 101 Essential Tips, Tricks & Hacks – I just got this one this week, it’s very nice to have an actual CSS book in my hands finally, the online guides just weren’t doing it for me. And this book has some nice chapters and compatibility notes.
• Perl Core Language Little Black Book – Just got this one this week too, thought I’d pick up the “little” (term used loosely, it’s 500 pages) one to see how I liked it before I got the big one (1328 pages). I keep picking it off my shelf and opening to random pages, I keep finding useful things, so getting more involved with this book would be good.
• Unix Shells by Example – As I’ve mentioned in the past, this is my favorite shell book, but I’ve only actually learned and used a few things, there is much more I want to get into, and I’d like to try out some of the different shells.

Now I’m off to work on some things. *wanders off*

So I have this 45 minute lunch break, during this I’ve been catching up on Livejournal entries, reading theregister.co.uk, boingboing.net and browsing news.google.com… but that is getting old already, what else is out there? What are your favorite news/blog sites?