The Empirical Manifesto

Every day this week that I've been back to work (I know that sounds funny it being only Tuesday, but trust me on this one) the only thing I've wanted to do is catch up on my friends list (which I all but ignored over the holiday), play with my server now that it's back online, and listen to some tunes. To date, almost none of that has happened. In a frustrating reversal of expectations, I've been forced to do work at work! It's really just not fair. I have been up to my eyeballs all day, every day, mired in the day-to-day operations of my facility. So far, things at work have gone very smoothly. The tireless efforts and dedication of my staff is what makes this possible. I have 80GB of mp3's on an external harddrive which is my Mac's sole iTunes library. I have 8GB at work. I spend most of my time at work, so why shouldn't I keep my harddrive at work? Volume, and quality of output devices mostly. It really is unfair. I have shitty speakers at work, and even if I didn't, I can't turn them up too loudly - my office shares a wall with a hallway. Back in Texas, during my 3-hour daily commute (oh, especially in the Sebring) I could listen to quality music at volume. This too has been snatched away from me in my desire to live close to work. I'm lucky to get two full tracks in. Of course my fondest recent memories are listening to Elmer Bernstein's STRIPES in photogoot's Avalon (Touring) throughout D.C. Taxation Without Representation! What a rush.

As soon as I get caught up at work, I plan on catching up with all of you. After work this week has been just as hectic. Because this past 4-day holiday was the most relaxing four days I've had in a year, I didn't even bother to work out. So, I've been catching up on that. Plus, the wife crawled all over my ass about not having holiday pictures printed yet. Remember my post about the Lexmark site being down during the XP-box rebuild? Yeah, the drivers page is still AWOL. Fuckers. I stretched the USB cable over to my Mac (I'd loaded the client when I was trying to get that gay USB print-server running) and this was the first time I'd used the scanning function of the MFP with teh max0r. It was noticeably slower than with the uber-box, but all this was made up for when I attempted to print ALL my pics with a single command from iPhoto. What an immeasurable joy! I created a separate folder and dumped all my photos into it - un-resized you understand, told iPhoto, make these all 3x5, fine-print photo on plain paper, six copies of each. It came back with: "38 pages. Proceed? How cool is that?

I also run my own online photo gallery, and have been saving photos for just about a year in which to update the gallery. That's going to take a lot of time. I haven't decided if I'm going to bulk-upload the files and add them from a 'local' filesystem, or weed through them first to categorize them and upload them via the web interface. I need to create new categories, as nothing from STL exists yet on it, except a one-year old photo of my team. I drank a glass of iced glühwein today. It was fantastic. My wife had hers heated.

She's got a full GB of RAM in her now: