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Looking For Quacks In The Pavement

Author: Karel Kerezman

  • Cleaning House, The Second Weekending

    Okay, so I blew off doing the cleanup I’d planned yesterday. Today, however, I believe I’ve made up for that lack. I dragooned Kyla into making a trip out to that new Ikea store (with a follow-up stop at Best Buy) and we came home with a few nice-and-cheap storage solutions that I spent the next few hours putting to good use.

    There’s a new hanging-shelf piece in my closet, consisting of some Velcro and a collapsible set of fabric shelves. Into those shelves went the various cold-weather pieces I had piled up hither and yon, along with a couple pairs of jeans that used to be wadded up on the closet floor. To make room for the shelving, I weeded out some of the clothing and bedding I’d thrown into the closet over the years. Yes, I actually threw stuff away. Amazing!

    I’m also in the middle of migrating my burned-CDs collection from those clunky, hard-to-sort binders into dual-disc sleeves which I’m filing into my new paperboard CD drawers. At $13 per set of two drawers with enclosure, it was too good a solution to pass up. As a side benefit, I’m culling lots of anime that I downloaded entirely for the kids’ sake. That will all go into one of the binders and sent to them for safe-keeping. I’m also burning some DVD-ROM discs to finish out a few series that I managed to botch up the organization of the first time around, or that I simply never got around to tidying up. That aspect of the cleanup project, of course, directly benefits the available disk space on my main computer and the network storage drive. Everybody wins!

    To round out the shopping trip I picked up a small, cheap external mouse for the laptop (touchpads annoy me, and a full-sized desktop mouse is a nuisance for mobile use) and a couple of cheap 2GB USB memory sticks. I don’t like the idea of feeding batteries into a wireless device, so my new mouse sports a retractable USB cord instead.

    I’m not done yet, of course. I have some laundry to do, more CDs to file and DVDs to burn, and I need to tidy up the explosion of fabric outside of my closet. My sense of accomplishment, however, is quite high. Hooray for organization and cleaning!

  • Burning More Vacation Time

    I’m taking a four-day weekend, starting today. We have something fun planned for tomorrow, and the rest of the time we’ll fill with whatever forms of rest and relaxation we find appealing.

    I should make a point of unloading the camera’s memory, shouldn’t I? Hmm. I wonder if CompactFlash prices have come down in the last year or so…

  • Nerd Two Point Oh

    I did a meme over at the Ell Jay, so why not do a meme over here as well? You may remember my results from the first Nerd Test; apparently they’ve updated the quiz somewhat.

    NerdTests.com says I'm a Cool Light-Weight Nerd. What are you? Click here!

  • Clean Today, Goof Tomorrow

    I set a goal for myself this weekend: Spend a few hours cleaning my bedroom & bathroom. Let’s see how I did…

    • The tan computer desk’s main surface and keyboard drawer have been decluttered and cleaned. Even the scanner, speakers and keyboard received a quick wipe-down. One can, for goodness sake, see the entire desk surface.
    • The bathroom sink and counter-top are clean.
    • I took the roomie’s spiffy new vacuum cleaner for a spin, and boy does my floor look good!

    The other computer desk needs a quick once-over, all of the hutches and shelving need their contents thrown on the floor and rearranged and/or tossed into the trash, and then there’s the small matter of my overflowing closet… but I think I’ve done enough damage for one day. I’m taking a four-day weekend after the coming joyfully-short work week, and my goal is to spend part of next Sunday making more visible progress on turning my living quarters into somewhat less of what many parental units around the world and over the years might refer to as “a pig-sty.”

    Not, mind you, that I normally live in filth. Just… clutter. Lots of clutter.

  • One Of The Good Days

    Most of my workdays are rather frustrating. I’m usually juggling three or four “urgent” problems from as many clients while flinging email messages hither and yon and trying to manage the ticket board and make note of system alerts from the managed services platform and, you know, try not to tear my hair out on account of any or all of the aforementioned tasks. The fact that I don’t like having to switch mental gears frequently, something I’m usually required to do all day, does not help one bit.

    Thanks, most likely, to the impending holiday weekend, the pace has been nicely quiet and I’ve been engaged in an unusual activity: getting things done. I deployed new monitoring configurations to our clients’ servers. I performed cleanup on our main virtual machine system in anticipation of a demo install on Tuesday. I configured backups on a client’s server which hasn’t enjoyed reliable backups in… well, let’s call it “far too long” and leave it at that, shall we? During all of this I also reconfigured the offsite backup replication for this server, and checked a few of the anti-spam configurations.

    All that, and my new laptop is almost ready for use. Today is indeed one of the better workdays I’ve enjoyed in a long time. That doesn’t stop me from looking forward to a few days off, of course…

  • The Pariah of Public Transit

    Once again this morning I was reminded of a fact that I can’t quite fit into my world view. I dress in clean clothes, I bathe every day, I do my best to present a pleasant (or at least neutral) demeanor, I lack disfiguring scars and tattoos and piercings, I use deodorant, I don’t take up that much space. So why is it that nobody wants to sit next to me on the bus or train?

    This morning, for instance, two people in a row stopped at my bench on the MAX, crouched a bit as if they were about to sit down, then apparently thought better of it and moved on. Most of the time on the bus, if I happen to be on the last bench with a free seat inside the entire vehicle, it’ll remain unoccupied while people stand in the aisle. It’s been this way for as long as I can remember.

    What gives, Portland? Why don’t you want to sit next to me? I don’t bite. Honest.

    (For the record, I don’t mind having elbow room. I just feel bloody damned conspicuous as the only person on the vehicle who’s sitting alone.)

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