Et Cetera

Just a bunch of random stuff. It's been a longish week, with no time to blog.

• Tuesday: We bought a satellite radio (XM) and it's great. It seems kind of weird paying for radio, but they have specialty channels that will simply never happen on your FM dial--which is odd, considering that diversity-killing Clear Channel is a backer of XM. Choosing a satellite service is difficult, because both Sirius and XM are evil in different ways. And there's a bit of uncertainty in the whole market anyway because of the merger. But I think we're not unhappy with our choice. The only problem is positioning the antenna: it needs southern exposure, and our house runs east-west with no south-facing anything.


• Wednesday: Minor crisis at work meant coming home late. At least, I think it was Wednesday. It's all sort of a blur.


• Thursday: Replacing my dead Macintosh has been an exercise in frustration; this is the second (of two) computers that I've bought from Apple that have Not Been Right out of the box. This one didn't have the latest operating system on it, but at least it HAD an OS, unlike the iBook when it was new. The irony is, now that they've sent me the new OS and I've installed it...I want the old one back. Leopard is so incredibly ugly that I can hardly stand to look at it.
  
  But I was able to restore my Perforce server with no data loss, get my iTunes library safely onto the new machine, and reinstall and reregister the greatest program ever, Circus Ponies Notebook, with no difficulty. The nightmare is over, even though it took me a week longer than I wanted it to because I was waiting for my copy of the ugly OS.


• Friday: Twenty years of late nights means that a person occasionally attains a state of unconsciousness a bit earlier than otherwise desired. I fully intended to Do Stuff last night, but I was snoring in my easy chair at nine and woke up twice before I realized that I should just go to bed.


• NaNoWriMo: Note that the bar hasn't moved in a few days. It's not because I haven't updated it. Good thing Thanksgiving is coming up.


• Meme: Wednesday Hump Day asks the not-too-terribly-musical question Name five things that are in your refrigerator and/or freezer right now. Which is not actually a question, when you look at it.
  
  
  
  • A block of Medium Cheddar cheese from Badger
  
  
  • A can of Diet Rite White Grape soda
  
  
  • A half-empty gallon jug of Kemp's Skim Milk
  
  
  • A pound or so of seedless red grapes
  
  
  • A jar of maraschino cherries that has been there since before the Civil War