Day: February 7, 2003

  • Friday Five: Food

    • What did you have for breakfast this morning? If you didn’t have breakfast, why not? – Two questions, okay. I had maple-flavored Malt-O-Meal for breakfast. And, I did have breakfast so the second question is irrelevant.
    • What’s your favorite cereal? – Oddly enough, Smart Start. It’s reasonably tasty and it’s good for me.
    • How often do you eat out? Do you want that to change? – And this makes a total of five questions. We don’t, as a couple or a family, eat out all that often. That’s a good thing given our finances, and it should only change if our finances improve drastically.
    • What do you plan on having for dinner tonight? Got a recipe for that? – Six and Seven. Hmm. Dinner is rarely a planned event at our house. It’ll probably be ramen noodles or sandwiches. If you need a recipe for ramen noodles, you really do need professional help.
    • What’s your favorite restaurant? Why? – Isn’t the “Why” sort of implicit? Morons. Nine questions, several of them redundant or irrelevant. Oh yeah: It’s a toss-up between Chang’s Mongolian, Tony Roma’s and The Original Hot Cake House. You know, the one right next to the Ross Island Bridge. And to answer the insipid question of “why,” it’s because I like the food. Duh.


    On a semi-related note, I’ve received quite a bit of encouragement for starting my own weekly “question” meme. I’m not sure if I should premiere it today or wait until next week. What do you think, sirs and madames?

    UPDATED 5pm: The overwhelming encouragement says, “Yes, I’m going to do it.” The bloody damned gods-awful afternoon at work says, “But not today.” Sorry. Thank you, all of you. I hope not to disappoint. Watch for a preliminary posting shortly.

    Oh, and it’s a sign of how frazzled I’ve been this week that I didn’t take advantage of the opportunity presented by the presumably-third question. And if you don’t know what I mean by that, you’re probably a better person than I am…
    Friday Five

  • Marketing Terms Defined

    Thank you, Jen.
    Subject: Marketing 101

  • Birth Of A Legendary Meme

    You know about my general dissatisfaction with the Friday Four Or Five Or So. Many of you share that dissatisfaction, expressed either through answers or commentary or the very sensible choice of simply not doing the FF.

    After receiving much encouragement in comments and emails, I’ve decided to strike out on my own. Between now and next Friday you’ll see the birth of… something.

    The (current) concept is: “Past, Present, Future.” Three “questions” per week. I’m sure you get the gist of it. I’m probably going to dedicate a subsection of this website to the meme instead of threading it directly through the main page (though my answers will appear here, naturally).

    So I’ll be spending the next few days building some website materials and arranging things, blah blah blah. What you can do to help is to suggest themes. Not questions per se, just themes I can wrap three “questions” around. Please use the email link over on the side (directly under the duck logo) instead of the comment box so I can easily collate and credit the suggestions. Thanks!

    What you can comment upon is whether you think I’m nucking futs for trying this… or if you think my idea blows goats. Better I find out now than a month down the road, no?

  • Ready for the weekend? You bet your sweet bippy.

    So why did my Friday go directly to hell at noon?

    1) The Entercom WAN network went completely down at about ten minutes past noon, Pacific time. It didn’t come back until nearly 5:00, at which time we finally learned that a Worldcom router had failed and caused the whole mess. For five crucial hours on a Friday afternoon we couldn’t get commercials downloaded for air, let alone emails in and out of the building. Imagine the joy.

    (Geeky side note: My proxy server scheme doesn’t work without a local DNS server, since everyone is told via DHCP to get DNS lookups from the Corporate office… an impossibility when the frame cloud is down. So I spent a couple of hours installing a dinky little caching nameserver. Next time I’ll be ready… if I can figure out where in Netware 5’s DHCP system you configure the nameserver info.)

    2) The Beast, our standby Enco fileserver, died. Or, rather, one of its hard drives died. This happened a few days ago, but I only routinely check up on the box about once a week. We have to order a replacement IDE drive in the 75 gigabyte range, then strap it in, power up the machine and configure a brand new RAID 0 array. Then I get to spend the following 48 hours copying data from the main Enco server. Yippee, ha ha, whee. Right now The Beast is on my workbench, missing a hard drive. So much for getting anything else done, like prepping the new PD Streaming box for Kansas City… or rolling out another Compaq (I’ve only done five so far!) or… well, much of anything.

    (Side note: I did get to spend about an hour playing “spot delivery boy,” since I had one of the few computers with a working Internet connection. Proud to serve, I am. And it was kind of fun. Call me weird.)

    And now I think I’ll go home and vegetate. And eat. And play games. Then I’ll come back on Sunday and get the work done I was supposed to do today…

    (Another side note, for the hell of it: So, is that enough posting for one day? Does it make up for the “lack thereof” during the rest of the week? I sure as hell hope so. Really now.)

    There, I’m done. See you tomorrow. Or Sunday.

    (One last side note: I added two new links to the blogroll. Moody In The Rain is Celina’s journal, and I put Hey! in as well. I’m all about Oregon thingie-ers. What, you want me to call ’em “bloggers?” Anyway… Visit and enjoy.)