2007.06.29 Happy Birthday, Fuzzy Modem. I never thought you'd live to see 27, but hey. Here you are.

11:42

Today is Lobot's last day here. His department is going to miss him. There were rootbeer floats. People are upset behind the scenes, because something feels Ain't Right. I tried to bid him farewell by shaking hands; he clarified that there had to be a hug, because he's a dirty old man. (It was cool, and he isn't creepy.)

12:57

Still getting stumped by the months problem. I don't see what it is. If I have to do something stupid to work around it, I will.

Today is not a good day for me and things. I dropped my keys coming out of the apartment. I had a little keychain, a plastic Alaska license plate with my legal first name on it (I'm actually Joan on my birth certificate, not Azz) and when I dropped the keys, that of course struck the concrete wrong and the corner with the hole in it shattered. Then I fumbled my "holding my purse and my keys and my mug" roll, and dropped the lovely raku cup that Mama got from her friend Jed for me. When it comes to half-full pottery cup vs. asphalt, the asphalt is going to win. I didn't see how it could be repaired. Not only did the handle come off, the handle came out, and then shattered into pieces that I knew I didn't have a prayer of putting back together.

I'm a potter's daughter. Things break. Epoxy is your friend. Life continues. One day your shard pile will be folded under a plate and reduced back to molten stone, and the cycle will continue. But it stings when your work tea cup is the latest casualty. In memory of it and its beauty, I'm writing to the fellow who made it to let him know that yes, it was both lovely and useful. Transient art deserves recognition at all phrases.

1:22

samurai_ko is working on a poster for the poem/rant that came out of me when I thought about "safe" creativity vs. unfettered creativity. I saw the current version of it, and it took my breath away. She's very good with graphics. I seem to have a thing with words some of the time. I like that about myself. I need to encourage that more when it happens. I'm not actually as fearless as I want to be in that poem, but maybe the seeds are there.

2:16

Traveling Manager's timesheets still aren't unlocked, but I came by at just the right time to teach her how to search for paragraph breaks and replace them with spaces. She's wrangling .pdf files (they got shipped to her that way) and has to make changes and reformat and do things and move things. Angst has been ensuing. She was removing spare paragraph breaks by hand. At least now she's doing find-and-replace. She said that I seem to come by at just the right time to teach her how to wrangle her technology.

4:15

o. headache. Traveling Manager's timesheets are looking A-OK, but Traveling Manager vs. the PDFs has escalated into the kind of grudgematch best saved for pro wrestling rings and carefully choreographed drama. Everything's almost OK until she runs into the kind that can't be copied or printed. This is not a situation that is made of win. At all. She's learned print-screen a few times, but it hasn't been internalized yet. I have the patience of a saint sometimes, but not always. And when I've got the patience of a saint is not when she has it.

...and o dear gods I think there may be ... leakage.

5:30

Incidentally, when you're changing the color of text in anything online or on anyone's computer, make sure that the background is the right color. And don't make assumptions about the default background color that someone else is going to have set. You know what color your text is and what color your background is. Now go over to the journal of one of your friends and see what color their background is.

At least one word in this sentence is going to be hard to read.

This sentence has ugly formatting, but you can read it. Sort of.

If you're going to override the default text color that someone has set, also override the background to provide sufficient contrast, even if you only wind up overriding it in shades of grey.

6:17

Have run out of tampons in my purse. Not dismayed; I had anticipated this. There is happy washcloth action going on right now, which should hold me until I get home. This is what black underwear is good for. If there is any leakage, it won't stain.

I have yet a third kind of bizarrity to hack at, database-wise. Part I is the calendar normalization, which is still boggling, but I think I might be able to force it into something coherent. Part II is the timeclock system acting on crack, which is Not My Problem, though I did do some second-person-there datascraping and troubleshooting, though I failed to draw any conclusions. Part III is me importing stuff from the timeclock system by force, in a way that I never designed my database to take it. SURPRISE.

To counteract the angst, have some Manfred Mann that's 4 years too early for 80s Music Friday.

6:39

Suggestions I want to make:

?style=yours:your_user_number (controversial, possibly crazy resources used, but it would be an amusing counterpart to ?style=mine.)

Notification on changed display name event of friends (potentially very popular, duplicates some nice client behavior, good for clearing up confusion, reasonably likely to be popular with people because it's the sort of thing you might want your friends to know).