I gave up on MS Office after Office97 and have been using OpenOffice for a while now. (And StarOffice8 on my solaris boxen at work.) Today I was on my windows box and needed to do the cool little "hold down ATL while dragging and select a rectange" then delete that rectangle. Office let me highlight and I hit delete... and nothing happened. I hit delete again. Still nothing. I hit backspace... nope. I finally cursed Microsoft aloud then tried CTRL-X which worked. WTFSoF? So I highlighted (without ALT) a word and pressed delete and STILL NOTHING HAPPENED. That was when I noticed down in the status bar and little text message saying "Delete Block? (Y)es (N)o" or something like that. If I hadn't wanted to delete it, I wouldn't have pressed the muthafuckin' delete key. If I pressed it accidentally, I'd hit the damned Undo button. Thanks MS, you just doubled the amount of work it takes me to delete a word. Good job numbnuts. Now, where's my OpenOffice installation CD?

People in Boston were drinking hand sanitizer and thought these were bombs. So all my Bostonian friends, how does it feel to be the sanest people in your city? ;-)

Monday morning when the alarm went off and I reached out to hit the snooze button, I noticed it felt really cold. I looked over at my atomic clock thingy that shows the temperature and it said it was 23F outside and 53F inside. I got out of bed and went to my bathroom. There was a heater so the bathroom was warm and note from my roommate saying, "I think the heat is fucked up. :-) Unplug this heater when you leave so it doesn't catch on fire." I called him on the way to work and he said he hadn't changed the filter in a while, so we'd check that after work.

After we checked all the simple stuff, I noticed two status LEDs, one of which was blinking. I looked it up on the internet and it turned out that a safety sensor had gone bad and was telling the unit it was overheating. We called a guy and he came out, figured out which one was bad, and ordered a new one. I worked from home today so I could let him in to swap the part.

Yesterday at work the VP of IT copied me on an email to the CFO. The subject was Bonus Recommendations and my name and 2 others were listed (oddly I was the only one CC'd on the email.) with dollar amounts beside the names. So I'm hoping that's approved, I could use it. The thought did cross my mind that he CC'd me on the email to placate me because they aren't going to give me the promotion we had discussed, or it's not happening right away. But I don't know, so I'll wait and see what happens.

I haven't worked from home in a while, and I had forgotten how productive I am when I'm not distracted by office noise, people stopping by my desk, etc. I figured out 2 stubborn issues that I've been working on this week the first half of the day. I was concentrating so hard I didn't read /. all day until now. My only big distraction was when the heat guy came to install the part.

I turned on the TV so I could put it on BET and listen to music. (They're one of the few channels that still plays videos for a large part of the day.) It's funny to hear the music because they mute the curse words and any drug references. There was a Lil' Wayne song on there that I went silent for about 15 seconds. :-) Also, when 3 Strikes came on, there were several scenes where most of the words were muted.

So we have heat again, which is good since they are calling for ice storms tomorrow. If that happens I guess I'll be working from home again.

http://www.shhh.com/ just has a flash embedded. It doesn't tell me anything. The page source comments are written in Spanish. In related news www.sh.com exists and you can keep adding 'h's up until you get to www.shhhhhhhh.com. That's the first one that doesn't resolve. Don't Ask.

So there are all these sites: LinkedIn, XING, Ryze, Ecademy, Passado, etc. I'm a member of the first 2 because JtS and Eth invited me to them. Ok, I joined... now what? Obviously some people make it a contest to see who can get the most contacts on them. (Yes, I heard about it all the way on the other side of the country, but I'm not going to mention your names... you know who you are.) Ok, so now I have this large network of... people that... also have large networks of people. Ok, so I can go to a job interview and say, "Look how many contacts I have on XING! You have to give me the job." I can't do that? But... they all gave me great endorsements!

Ok, I can use people I have worked with as a reference, but... I already had all that contact info stored in Gmail.

So now what? Has anyone used this internet fad for anything other than joining and adding contacts and wondering what the hell you get for all that time you put in to it? Maybe I'm not thinking "outside the box", but then painting your case never solved video card issues.

I started tagging all the journals written by circle members that make it through the FireHose to the front page. I'm tagging them as "circle".

http://www.atlantawatershed.org/news/advisory_details.aspx?id=74

Yeah, we were working on the sewer and cracked a water main, so you MIGHT want to boil the water... just in case. Let's hope they are smart enough to connect the proper ends back together.

Mom just called me and said Wal-Mart got 15 Wiis today and she was there went to stand in line. She got one, and she's on the way home now to hook it up. I'm hoping it'll connect to her wireless network... her WAP is on the 3rd floor and the bigscreen is in the basement. They may have to move the WAP. I should send this to Nintendo... so they can put it on a commercial where they just read it and then look up at the camera and say, "How you like them apples, Sony?"

If you read this JE, then you know this dude tried to send my package to my gmail address. So today I checked paypal to see what the dealio was. Well the old shipping number is gone and there as new one. This one says it was shipped. I checked the address just in case. The address is:
[real.name]@gmail.com [Real Address]
Atlanta, GA [ZIP]

Close enough I guess.

Is this not the ugliest hotel manager ever? Wow. I've never been to an "Extended Stay" hotel. Of course, I have never bought meth, so...

So I ordered a ZyAIR G-302 PCI Adapter online at PriceGrabber.com. It was like $33 after shipping, which was cheaper than I could find in the stores. I chose a merchant that had several in stock and had a high rating. Judging from the name, he's Chinese and he might not have a firm grasp of how the USPS works. I say this because when I found my shipment of Burning Halo Hot Sauce this morning, I thought it was going to be my card (before I looked at the size of the box and realized it wouldn't fit in there.) So I checked the shipping confirmation and clicked the link to the USPS tracking number the guy's software had generated. It said there was no record of this being shipped. Odd... so I looked further down in the email. I looked at the shipping address and almost died laughing... he tried to send a package to... my gmail address.

So a girl that is friends with a female friend of mine gave me her number before Christmas. We've talked and met for drinks, but nothing "formal". Today she sent me an SMS (Text message) saying she had created a myspace account and wanted me to add her to my friends list. Myspace is blocked from work, so I was going to write back "I'll add u tonight." I use the autospell function, which works well most of the time. Apparently 2-3-3 resolves to "bed" before "add", so it came out, "I'll bed u tonight." That's what I was THINKING, but I didn't want to WRITE that. :-)

I bought the game last night and, as arb pointed out, it DOES have multiplayer. You just have to beat single player first. I don't know why my neighbor thought otherwise, but I imagine it has something to do with him not reading the manual and making an assumption based on the Wiimote with a 1 on it on the back of the box.

So the city I used to work in was Cleveland, TN. I know, most people didn't know that a Cleveland outside Ohio existed. So today one of the guys at work that knows where I used to work asked if I still knew any accountants up there. I said yes and he sent me a link to some job... in Cleveland OH. I don't know how he missed the OH at the end of every address or why it would be TN instead of OH. I mean, I worked there and I still assume OH when I hear Cleveland.

Well my neighbor got WarioWare Smooth Moves for the Wii. I went over and took my Wiimotes and he said, "You apparently assumed it would be multiplayer also..." It's 1 player? Are you kidding me? Who releases a single person Minigame disc? I mean, the point of minigames is that you can play them WITH FRIENDS. Ok, well it turns out that it isn't the end of the world for Wario... we adapted our play style so you were playing 1 game then watching (read: drinking) the next, so it's all cool. We also did "go until you fail" stylie rules on the block stacker. If you haven't played, the block stacker is like the next stage of evolution for tetris. you get blocks (squares, rectangles and TRIANGLES!!!) that all weigh different and have different texture (some are slippery and with the triangles you have slopes to deal with... some are tacky and won't slide fast.) OH and you don't move or turn the blocks... no... your Wiimote controls a little platform that you can move side to side and tilt side to side. You have to catch them on the platform and stack them by moving it. The platform doesn't have sides, and if you drop the pieces, you lose. You have to catch all the block sand hold them up for 3 seconds after the last piece lands. If they fall just as time running out, it's ok, as long as none of them go off the screen before time runs out. That's just 1 game. There are a lot... here's the Nintendo page with a video of some of the games and how to play. HILARIOUS!

Other Wii Stuff:

When you become a PRO (your skill level is > 1000)in Wii Sports Bowling, you get a shiny new ball with stars on it. :-)

Tony Hawk Downhill Jam is harder than the other Tony Hawk games, because if you miss a letter (to spell SKATE) it's not like you're in a room that allows you to swing back by as you do another trick. It's virtually impossible to get them all on the first run because you don't know where they are, you have to do a scouting run first. Meh.

There John, you happy now?