london thus far

A quiet Friday night allows me to catch up a bit on all of my usual goings-on. I haven’t missed being online all that much, to be honest, perhaps because I’m in a fantastic city with people I like. And, o yeah, I’m getting some work done, too. The flight from SFO was nicer than I expected it to be. My boss and I flew British Airways‘ World Traveler Plus class, which I think is comparable to Economy Plus on other airlines. The seats are cushier and there is more legroom, plus there are small perks like free drinks and individual video screens. I thought I might catch up with some email replies, but between the napping and the movie-watching (the mostly-mediocre Black Dahlia) and the eating, the 10.5 hours were quite full. We arrived at...

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Posted on 26 Jan 2007 | 4 comments

mandatory calm

mandatory calm

I would do the “five things you don’t know about me” meme that is floating around, but after nearly nine years of keeping an online journal, I think you know everything about me I’m willing to catalogue. My farewell dinner was fantastic: hanger steak in marsala cream sauce with lentils. It smelled so good in here while the MSG was cooking. I’m sure I’ll eat well in London, but I’ll miss this a lot. Since I’m not usually very girly, I feel the need to document girly moments in my life, such as the glee I felt when acquiring these Camper boots on sale. The right boot has vowels on it and the left has consonants. Glee! I wish I could sleep. In just a few hours, I need to be functional enough to do some work and...

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Posted on 22 Jan 2007 | 1 comment

irrelevant and mysterious title

My most excellent SFlickr peeps showed me how to do a few things with my new camera last Thursday. Now I am less afraid of using it, but more antsy to take Great Photos, which just isn’t happening yet and won’t for a while. Still, some have come out better than I expected, and I’m sticking those in my Flickr photostream. London looms in less than a week, and I wonder if I’ll get lost, and exactly how poetic that will be. Not very, I imagine, since I’m there on business and not pleasure. Thanks for your recommendations, by the way. I expect to have exactly 37 non-working minutes to myself, but I’m determined to make it to the Tate Modern, the Globe, and the British Library. With the remaining 7 minutes, I will take a...

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Posted on 15 Jan 2007 | 5 comments

bedazzled

Well, now! What did the royal we do with the first half of our week? What’s that? Recover from food poisoning? Marvelous! Just how we wanted to spend it. I leave for London in what I now call “a week and a half” because that unit of measurement is enticingly vague: seven days plus three to five, I think, because seven plus six that makes it “almost two weeks” and seven plus one or two makes it “just over a week”. Yes, I think about this stuff. A lot. Someone has to. But anyway: London! And yay! And reading my guide book and yay. Last week, a coworker made a comment about an outfit I was wearing, and I tried not to read much into the comment but it was something along the lines of, “Are you wearing a summer...

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Posted on 10 Jan 2007 | 6 comments

ma.gnolia

Unsurprisingly, I have quite a few bookmarks, and also as unsurprisingly, I like to keep them organized. For the past year or so, I’ve been using del.icio.us to do this — where the “Clicking” links in the leftmost sidebar are from — and I don’t hate it. In fact, I quite like the “links for you” feature because my friends save neat things for me. But I don’t use it to its fullest potential because I don’t like navigating the site itself and I don’t seem to get relevant search results from it. In fact, half the time I do a search, del.icio.us serves me a totally blank page. So when someone I respect as much as Thomas Hawk reviews a different service favorably, I take a look. To be clear about my...

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Posted on 6 Jan 2007 | 4 comments

print, again with the dying

Apropos of a conversation I had with some coworkers yesterday, about misspellings and mispronunciations: I used to get very upset about people misspelling my name. I even refused to set up email forwarding to catch various misspellings. Now when someone does it, I don’t get upset. I just immediately and without exception think less of that person. That may be an aggressively snotty statement, but I simply do not have time for people who don’t have the energy or attention span or whatever is required to get 7 letters in the right order all at once. Despite holding my clearly-printed calling cards, people manage to misspell my email address. Does anyone really expect a message sent to johnsmioth@somedomain.com to get to John Smith? Typos are a part...

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Posted on 4 Jan 2007 | 11 comments

picture perfect

When the MSG invited me to dinner tonight, I didn’t think much of it. We haven’t been going out to dinner lately, so his announcement that we should seemed to make sense, despite just having spent a long weekend together, filled with plenty of good food. Just after 21:00, he texts me with his location: at the corner down the street from my flat. I think that is slightly odd, since he usually meets me at my front door, but maybe he wants to go to the restaurant on that corner, so no biggie. O, he’s in my car, I think as I reach the corner. Since his car has all but given up the ghost, he’s taken to driving mine when he needs to run errands. It works out for me, too, since then I don’t have to move it to avoid street cleaning...

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Posted on 2 Jan 2007 | 10 comments

hello 2007

The party last night was a success. I had a lovely time with my friends, and everyone seemed to like the food the MSG and I worked so hard on. On the final menu: crudite of blanched watermelon radishes, Spanish radishes, broccoli, cauliflower, bell peppers and purple carrots with blue cheese dip and heirloom bean puree turkey confit (cooked in olive oil with sage) served on a bed of baby mustard greens truffled potatoes au gratin chicken skewers with peanut dipping sauce sauteed rapini with garlic 2006, in brief and in no particular order: After 10 years in libraries, I decided to make the big move to web development, and did. The MSG and I celebrated our third anniversary. I watched the entirety of “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and...

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Posted on 1 Jan 2007 | Comments Off