Tonight I was awarded the “Person Who Best Exemplifies Our Company’s Culture” or something to that wording. It felt great to be recognized as such because it was voted upon by my peers. I feel proud and very appreciative right now. In addition to a bottle of sparkling cider, this is the statue I won. I will lurv her.

Here are some posts that, because of my mobile WordPress not working properly, I wasn’t able to upload at the time they were written. They’re from the vaults of two months ago.

Nov 28, 2010 1:50 PM

Sometimes it’s funny how much/little time & space actually change. For instance, I’m sitting here in Mr. Henry’s Victorian Pub in 2010, alone, inputing this copy on an iPad, whereas 25 years ago I was here with a table full of friends, drinking and smoking up a storm, listening to the 45s in the jukebox. Today the Internet jukebox is silent, smoking has been banned but I’m still having a cocktail. Because for me that’s what Henry’s is about: cocktails. Well, cocktails and good times with friends. I’m here at an unusual time ( 3:30 on a Wednesday) but the friends will show up later.

Fast forward four days…

Now I’m sitting in my new favorite coffee shop, First Cup Cafe. A random stop that I found here, and they just infirm me they’ll be closing in half an hour, so let’s see how much writing I can get in. First Cup is located across the street from where I looked to move (into Mira’s apt) a few years ago but didn’t make it past the screening process. So it could have been my neighborhood coffee shop but for now it’s one that I happened to drop into for coffee and a place to kill time.

Why am I killing time, you ask? For a number of reasons, actually. The first is that today is (another) Open House day at 1526 so, on my day off, I have to get out and do something. Luckily, Jim Darling was participating in an iPhone-only photography exhibit so I went and saw that since he was going to be at the gallery today. The gallery is Fathom Creative’s and there’s way too many personal references to go into right now about Fathom. Let’s just say I always wanted to work there.

After the exhibit I wandered down to the National Archives to do some genealogy research for my Dad. Since I’m seeing him in a few days I figured I should get this down since he asked me to do it several months ago. I find out they’re closed on Sundays so I will again be playing the role of FailureSon this year for Thanksgiving. Sigh.

I’m meeting with friends later and due to public transportation and needing to be out of the house, it doesn’t make sense to go home, hence the killing time wandering around, it feels like 1995 all over again, when I would wander around DC as a new transplant, maybe it’s time to listen to some Blur.

Now I’ve walked the few blocks to Logan Circle which is nothing like the Logan Circle I used to know. Boughie! And nary a homeless person in sight!

Dupont Circle. Now *this* place has definitely changed in the last 20 years.

And here’s another archive:

Dec 1, 2010 sometime in the afternoon

Today is another kicked-out-of-the-house-due-to-realtors day. Which really sucks because I’ve got an ad that’s due and I’d really like to be working on it right now. Sigh. Another hour to go.

I walked down to Jacob’s to get some coffee but they were too crowded and it was way too warm in there. So I journeyed on down to Sova, on H, and it’s pretty nice in here, sofas and chairs to lounge on but no free WiFi. But that’s fine, I’m using signal from the Biergarten next door.

Here’s Duran Duran making a video of making a video. It’s footage from their publicity shoot(s) for their album All You Need Is Now, which is available now on iTunes. The deluxe expanded version drops March 22 in digital and physical formats.

I like that this video features the very new wave sounding “Blame The Machines”. It’s track 2.

Hello there.

Today is the 2nd day of the first two days in a row I have had off since August. I am doing absolutely nothing, just like I did yesterday: being lazy at home. Waking up whenever I want, making coffee and surfing, listening to music. I didn’t shower yesterday and I won’t shower today either.

This is the first post of 2011. And the first post since three months ago. I could write the delay off to 1) my last updating of WordPress software went wrong and there are errors in uploading on my mobile devices; 2) the Big Computer Crash of ’11 that kept my li’l iMac out of commish for about a month; or 3) downright laziness. I’ll let you decide which is most appropriate.

Here’s more about the BCC of ’11. My iMac is over five years old and I’ve never had one single problem with it. Last month I started having some strange reboot issues. The computer would freeze up on restarts, turning the fan on before the desktop appears and then hanging there. Sometimes another hard reboot would allow it to boot up properly, sometimes not. Then it got to the point where the freeze/fan would happen every time. Time for a doctors appointment.

It was hard drive failure. Fine. For $200 I get a new, twice as large hard drive (500M). I’m trying to restore my Time Machine backups on there and after a week or so of fidgeting/resetting the hard drive crashes AGAIN. So this is my now 3rd hard drive and everything seems to be going okay. Thank Zod for TM backups, at least I didn’t lose any information.

So that’s about it for now. Let’s talk again soon.

WMATA, Metro’s official name, has been has been undergoing “scheduled track work” on all five of its train lines for about the last six weeks. This track work involves “one-tracking” which is where they will close one side of the track fir the work and the cars have to share the other side of the track, taking their turn one at a time. As you can probably guess, there are massive delays.

They have scheduled these track work days on the weekend as to not interfere with all the government workings commuting into the DC, as this was the reason the entire Metro transit system was built. Like most elements of life in DC, those who are not lawyers, politicians or suck-up lobbyists, our needs don’t really matter. So having to get to work on time during the weekend while having to rely on Metro is, needless to say, a great big pain in the ass.

So here’s my idea for a mobile app. It would be called “Made U Look!” and would function something like this:

Once the app was installed on your phone, your phone’s GPS would automatically register when you entered a Metro station. Maybe you would have to check-in manual but it would be cool if it did it automatically. It would also automatically check with WMATA’s Trip Planner page. After the inevitable numerous delays, when you exited the system your phone would again mark which station you are exiting from and communicate with WMATA. Then, it would reverse calculate how long that trip should have taken according to the Trip Planner and then compare it to the actual time you sat in the dark tunnel waiting for that goddamned train. As a bonus, you would be able to log into your Made U Look account and see how you rank with others who have wasted time for waiting for trains to see who has wasted the most time that week, month and quarter. Great idea, right?

I’m writing this post in Pages on my iPad, and will upload it onto my iDisk, since my WordPress app isn’t working correctly. There, enough technology references for ya?

I see that I haven’t written any in the last six weeks. Which is unusual compared to how frequently I posted when I started this thingie here. I guess time and different life circumstances make for a lot of change and will alter one’s writing/documenting habits.

Nanowrimo is coming up in a couple of weeks (they’re already ramping up their tweets on Twitter). If you”ll remember from last year, November is NAtional NOvel WRIting MOnth and I took part in that and it was fun.

So in order to get back into writing maybe doing this on my iPad (which I love, btw) will make it a little more fun to write. Stay tuned to see if I tackle nanowrimo this year.

…

It’s been almost three and four years since Rattle & Hum, The Twins™, have died. Friends and family have repeatedly asked if I was going to get another pet and when. I took care of Mike’s cat, Aris, for a while last summer and that was fun, he is a great cat. But being unemployed at the time I didn’t think it a good idea to take on another expense. I watched the black alley cat, Mama Kitteh, for weeks while she nursed her four kittens. I desperately wanted to do a smash-and-grab on the two gray ones. But again, being only partially employed at that time, economics won out and I had to let them move on as well.

A third opportunity has presented itself. My neighbor Kevin got a kitten for his daughter but his baby-mama said the kitten wasn’t working out so he took the cat back. I volunteered weekend before last to cat sit while he was out of town for the weekend. I assumed this would involved me coming into his apartment to feed and care for the cat. Instead, he brought the cat to me. He either didn’t want the unattended kitten to tear up his apartment or it was a sly way to make me fall in love with it. When he brought the cat over I had just woken up from a nap so I was a little out of it. He said something to the effect of “keeping the cat if I wanted to” but in my sleep/haze I wasn’t sure if he had said it or not.

Over the weekend the cat snuggled up to me and seemed to enjoy her surroundings. His daughter named the kitten Princess, a name I would have to change if I was to become the food FoodGiver. Her pretty eyes are the color of butterscotch pudding so I’ve named her ‘Scotch (note the apostrophe). ‘Scotch is loving and cute and still a kitten. This last aspect is the only thing that irritated me over the weekend, with her hyperactivity, jumping (on me) with claws full-on, etc. And then I needed to remember that this is what kittens do, and in time she will mellow out.

Come Monday when Kevin came back to pick-up/discuss said kitty’s residency I told him that I just needed a few more days with her, through the full week and next weekend to make my decision. Well I think that decision has already been made because I went to the grocery store on Saturday and picked up a big bag of dry food, cans of wet food and some kittie litter.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you: ‘Scotch.

I’ve owned four computers in my life: a Performa 630 CD, the very first bondi blue iMac, a PowerBook (Pismo) and my current iMac G5. Sixteen years ago, while owning that Performa, no one thought of backing up their files in case their hard drive crashed. It was just a given that the computer would continue to run as expected. And you could always transfer files to a diskette if you needed to keep them extra special.

Now that my iMac is an achingly old (in computer lifespans) five years I’ve decided it’s time to back up all those old files just in case there is an impending hard drive crash (or monitor outage, logic board death, etc). So now I’ve got all that info saved. I was going to write about this experiencing concerning an Apple product that I’m using but I’ve decided against that so this post may be a little abbreviated from what it was once going to be. Sorry about that. But all’s well with the backup. And it’s being done wirelessly.