Mmm Friday.

It’s my youngest sister’s birthday today, she’s turning 16. Egads, 16! This is a big birthday for her because in Maine you can drop out of school without your parent’s consent when you’re 16, and she’s been claiming she would for a couple years. Because of her recent change of schools and tutoring I’m hoping that she’s changed her mind, but I can so easily see her getting upset and annoyed one day and quitting on a whim. I’ll give her a call tonight to see how she’s doing.

The week slowed down a lot for me after tuesday, which is great, I’m not feeling mopey or stressed out anymore. I’m really looking forward to movie night tonight at ‘s place. Michael is going to stop by the beer store this afternoon, and hopefully swinging by the liquor store as well to get me a bottle of wine. I’m in a wine mood.

Which brings me to another subject, Pennsylvania’s liquor laws.

Pennsylvania is a “dry state” which basically means they have stupid alcohol laws.

All “Wine and Spirits” shops are state run, and often have strange hours. Just last year they opened a few on Sundays, which was quite a radical change.

You can only buy beer in restaurants that have a liquor license (and there are plenty around here that don’t) or at a “Beer Store” where they only sell beer by the case. Many establishments have skirted the law a bit by opening “restaurants” that sell cheap take-out food and have TONS of beer by the bottle and six-pack, but those are mostly in the city.

It’s all very strange. I guess they established this model because they are against drinking, thinking that if you limit the places and times people can buy it at you might limit their drinking somehow. I think it’s done the opposite, at least in our case. When you buy beer you can’t just buy a six-pack to enjoy for the evening, you need to buy a whole case (and now that I have a whole case in my fridge you better believe I’m going to drink it!). When we drop by the liquor store we stock up because going to the store when it’s open is a pain and who knows when we’ll have the time to come back?

I should look around for alcoholic statistics nationwide (most of what I find just deals with under-aged drinking), taking into consideration rural vs city areas (because we all know that there is nothing to do in rural america except drink </sarcasm>). Does Maine have a higher rate because you can buy hard liquor in some grocery stores? Do Pennsylvania’s crazy-feeling laws actually make fewer people drink?

We should just abolish these silly laws, and the drinking age. I think they often turn out doing more harm than good. I drank much more before I turned 21 than I do now, and I know that’s true for most people.

The other day we were listening to the radio and a brilliant young musician said he had a lot of trouble reading sheet music because he is dyslexic.

What the hell, is half the world dyslexic? Why do I keep running into and finding out about people who are? Is this the neurological equivalent to ADD/ADHD? Is every late bloomer dumped into the “dyslexic” category?

When I was in elementary school I was diagnosed with dyslexia. Both my parents were dyslexic, so it didn’t come as a surprise to them. For a very long time I never questioned this diagnosis. I was put into special ed classes, and it took me a few years to get up to speed with my peers as far as english language skills go. Then, when I was in 8th grade, I won an award for doing far above average in a state-wide reading comprehension test.

Today I read all the time (my love for books borders on obsession), I write all the time. For a while I assumed it was because the special ed teachers were properly trained to deal with my condition and did very well with teaching me in the proper learning methods for dyslexics. I thought I had gotten so good at using these techniques that it natural to me. But now I wonder. Why are so many people diagnosed with this? Do I even really have it?

I’ve been doing some research and I am starting to think I don’t. I found a list of “Common Signs in Adults” here. It doesn’t sound like me.

# May hide reading problems. I no longer have reading problems.

# May spell poorly; relies on others to correct spelling. I am not a poor speller.

# Avoids writing; may not be able to write. I love writing, even considering it as a career.

# Often very competent in oral language. Nope.

# Relies on memory; may have an excellent memory. Nope, I have to write everything down.

# Often has good “people” skills. HAHAHA!! No!

# Often is spatially talented; professions include, but are not limited, to engineers, architects, designers, artists and craftspeople, mathematicians, physicists, physicians (esp. surgeons and orthopedists), and dentists. This is rather broad.

# May be very good at “reading” people (intuitive). Nope.

# In jobs is often working well below their intellectual capacity. Ok, that’s true.

# May have difficulty with planning, organization and management of time, materials and tasks. Quite the contrary. I have excellent time management and planning skills, and can be sickeningly organized when I want to be (which is not often, I’m lazy).

# Often entrepreneurs. Nah, I tried, but it was too stressful.

Other sites have said things like “dyslexics learn better by hearing” but it’s not at all that way for me. Give me a book, some dry examples, google and a goal and I’ll be able to tackle whatever you throw at me. Explain it to me aloud and I’ll be scratching down notes as fast as possible so I have a record of it to refer to.

So now my only excuse for having a hard time learning to read is that I’m a late bloomer (there is probably a cool sounding techical term for this). I can live with that.

The past few days I’ve been feeling weird.

I think it comes from a bit of stress over the weekend. It’s not even a lot of real things, I just have a horrible tendancy to blow things out of proportion in my mind and freak out about them[1]. Usually I can go through some meditation and relaxation techniques and make my brain feel better, but I just had so many things on my mind this weekend that *something* would creep back into my mind each time I started feeling a bit more clear-headed.

Luckily everything that was on my mind has been resolved in positive ways!

So I should feel better now.

But I don’t.

Perhaps I need cake.

[1] This is a problem I’ve been dealing with for years. I’m much better than I used to be. In high school I didn’t know good meditation and relaxation techniques so I’d let everything build up until I’d break down in an exhausted mess. Now I’m able to control most of my worries, unless there are too many.

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.