Current entry Archive September 2000

Behind These Eyes - September 2000

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Saturday, 16 September

Fair warning: This entry is unusually long.

Here it is, the inaugural entry of what may eventually be an on-line diary. In typical fashion, I've got the cart before the horse, because I don't yet have a site to post the diary on. I'm working on the site like crazy, but if I wait till I consider it ready, I may never get there, and in the meantime I'm missing lots of days full of interesting events. So I've decided to start the diary now, and when the site eventually gets posted, why, it'll already be well-stocked with diary entries.

Why am I doing this? Well, my life is rather...complex at the moment. You see, I'm in the process of moving from the US to the UK. My family is understandably somewhat ambivalent about this, so I promised to consider posting a diary to help them feel like they can remain in touch with my day-to-day life if they want to. (We can call each other, of course, but the 5-hour time difference will make weeknight calls somewhat problematic.)

See, there's this guy named Mike...

Well, maybe some back-story is in order.

No, there's too much to explain. Let me sum up.

I'm not what you could call your typical gal. For one thing, I don't care about any of the things women are supposed to. I'm much more interested in things like astronomy, science fiction, and how things work. My idea of fun is to spend 14 hours straight with my head buried deep in a programming project, to the point where I forget to eat.

Sometime in late fall of 1999, an unrelated web search turned up the MBTI (Meyers-Briggs Temperament Indicator). I'd never heard of it, but I gave it a try, and was thoroughly impressed by the results. It took a bunch of fairly generic questions and gave back an extremely specific personality profile that wasn't just a rephrasing of the test questions. Not only was it specific, it was almost frighteningly accurate. I felt like someone was peeking inside my head with a flashlight.

The test classed me as an INTP. I was so startled by the experience of having my own quirky personality described to me in such minute detail that I did some more looking around on the web, to see what I could find out about being INTP. Almost immediately I happened upon a mailing list for INTPs, to which I subscribed, just out of curiosity. The list volume was enormous, so I couldn't keep up with it, but from what I read, these people really were a lot like me--not something I'm used to encountering!

For several months I just read other people's postings, but in February I "de-lurked", which means I sent a message to the list, introducing myself. One of the people who responded to my de-lurking post was Mike, another de-lurker himself. Included in his post was a URL to his web site, which I had a glance around, followed by a closer look, followed by intense scrutiny. It was quite obvious that he was similar to me, to a scary degree, and I found him very interesting.

A flurry of email back and forth established an interest on both sides. There was just one tiny snag: He lives in England; I live near Boston.

Hmm. Bit of a commute there.

Still, we had to know, so in May--1,300 long emails later--I visited the UK, at which point we met for the first time in person. Things worked out amazingly well. Being stony-hearted, I'm uncomfortable with using the word "love", especially in public, but there it is; too late to call it back now.

We agreed that we enjoyed each other's company enough to begin pursuing the drastic options--namely, one of us moving to the other country. From the beginning, there's been a slight bias that it should be me who moves there, mostly for various practical reasons, but also because I have been fascinated with England since I was a small child, whereas the US isn't the kind of place that inspires fascination. But just to make sure, our next step was to have Mike visit the US, which happened at the end of July. After that we concluded that we'd proceed with the me-to-the-UK option.

I realize that it all sounds very strange and implausible when written down like this, especially in such a summarized form. (And if it's difficult to explain convincingly in writing, imagine trying to explain it to your family.) You'll just have to take my word for it that we are not besotted fools with no understanding of what we're naively getting into. Being the analytical types that we are, we have explored our situation down to the least minutiae in a very candid, open fashion. I would not be going to this considerable effort and expense if I didn't have good reason to believe that we have the potential to enjoy each other's company a great deal.

Fortunately for anyone who is curious about how such a situation could have evolved, Mike began keeping his on-line diary shortly before all this started, so you can actually watch its development over time. The whole diary is interesting, but below are specific links to some relevant entries from the formative period.

February 12, 19, 22, 23, 28
March 6, 8, 17, 19
May 12

And also

June 6, 7

...Oh, are you back now?

So anyway, this is really happening, and I'm in the middle of the longest to-do list you ever saw, trying to sort out all the complexities of an international move. On top of the things you might expect, like shipping most of my stuff across the ocean, and preparing to look for a new job in the UK, you may not realize that in this modern western world of ours, you can't just wander freely from country to country any more. I have to go through a formal immigration process; otherwise I can't stay there longer than six months, and I can't be employed at all.

So OK, I have to go through immigration. No problem, right? Well, you also can't just decide to immigrate to another country; basically, someone already there has to import you. A company can import you, but in UK immigration this is a very restrictive way to enter the country, because your residency is tied to the particular job you were imported for. You can't change jobs without starting all over again, and if the job ends, you have to leave. Also, there's a catch-22 in that you can't legally job-hunt in the UK on a tourist visa, so I'd have to convince a company 3,000 miles away that they ought to want me enough to go through a complex immigration process on my behalf. I'm good, but maybe not that good. Even if I am that good, it would probably take a long time, and we're both feeling slightly impatient.

Our only other option is...get married.

Ironically, we are probably the only two people alive in the world today who don't want to get married; we had each independently determined long ago that we are against the idea of marriage. For many people, this is a meaningless statement, like saying you're against childhood or some equally unalterable fact of life. Yet it is important to us, and we do have our reasons; you can read Mike's take on it if you're curious.

Paradoxically, the fact that we are both against it, and for very similar reasons, makes it less unpalatable. We won't have any misunderstandings between ourselves about what it means, or have mismatched expectations. We both regard it as just one more bureaucratic hoop we have to jump through, nothing more. We'll do it, and then forget about it, I suspect.

One strange thing is that I'm hurtling headlong into all this, running on a fairly tight schedule, and yet almost nobody knows anything about it. My family knows, and one or two friends have been told, but otherwise it's still pretty much under wraps. This isn't out of a desire to keep it secret, but rather mostly just because I don't enjoy explaining it. It's hard to broach the subject in a way that doesn't sound crazy, and I don't relish the ensuing conversation in which the other party tries, most delicately, to venture the possibility that maybe I haven't really considered what I'm doing.

I think you can see why I wanted to get this diary started without further delay. I'm in the middle of a very exciting and busy time, and it'd be nice to capture some of my thoughts while it's going on. You're coming in at the middle of the story, but I'll provide explanations and history as necessary (or, more likely, cheat by pointing you to relevant entries in Mike's diary).

Today was largely occupied with working on my proto-site. I also began creating a CV, which is analogous to an American résumé, but different enough to require extensive rework (and my résumé wasn't in very good shape to begin with anyway, so it didn't provide much of a starting point). The site and the CV are both major items on my pre-move to-do list (after all, I need to be ready to job-hunt before I get there).

I've been at the computer continuously since 9:00 this morning (except for an hour and a half or so on the phone to Mike), but since I actually enjoy that, I'd count this as an excellent and productive day!

Completed at 2:33 AM

Sunday, 17 September

Today I learned that of all the ways you can start your morning, finding a drowned bug at the bottom of your teacup isn't one of the better ones...

Having stayed up kind of late last night, I didn't get up until about 10:00, whereupon I promptly settled right back in at the computer and picked up where I left off. Lots more work on the site and the CV. Sometimes it's very daunting, because I've already set up an ambitious structure for the site, and filling it in can seem like an overwhelming amount of work. But I like writing, and working at the computer, and this combines both (while simultaneously giving me an opportunity to learn HTML--new toy!), so I'm well motivated.

I have to admit, though, that it's sometimes frustrating, particularly the CV. It's a lot of work to decide what to include, how to say it so that it means something to anyone other than me, and how to make it even remotely readable...

And why is it that all CVs (and résumés for that matter) naturally settle to a length of a page and a half, and resist all attempts at shortening or lengthening? (Hmm, I wonder whether you can buy lengthening at the supermarket?)

Even the web site is treasonously and obstreperously presenting me with challenges, to which I haven't yet found any good solutions. It's all because of navigation bars and site maps. The customary ways to orient these are either down the left side or across the top. There's nothing wrong with down-the-left-side; I just happen to prefer across-the-top, aesthetically. But this approach has built-in problems. Too many top-level categories can make the navigation bar too wide. Too many entries in a submenu can make the navigation bar extend quite far down the page before you get to actual content. I don't want my site to have pages where you have to scroll down just to get to the title...

I won't go into detail about all the options and possibilities I've considered (and Mike has been very helpful here, since he really knows HTML and web site design); suffice it to say that there have been a lot, each with its own drawbacks.

I'm focusing on the things I haven't sorted out yet, but in truth it's been a very productive day. I have one flavor of CV almost finalized, and another getting very close. I did an enormous amount of work on the site (including a complete reorganization of sections I'd written months ago, so that they don't parallel my old US-style résumé any more). In fact, the content is almost all in good shape; if I can just settle on a navigation bar style, it'll be ready to post.

Mostly.

Maybe.

And now for something completely different: Tonight I've begun reading Diaspora by Greg Egan, which is one of the books Mike brought me in July. I'm only on about page 3 and it's already promising to be very, very strange...

Right. Time for bed.

Completed at 1:05 AM

Monday, 18 September

OK, so there is a lot more unfinished material on the work site than I realized. I'd been focusing so closely on the CV-related parts that I forgot what deplorable condition the rest of it is in. Still, I made yet more major progress this evening. I settled the navigation bar question; pared down, or cut out entirely, a lot of blithering (so whatever blithering is still there, just remember, there could have been a lot more); and completely finished up all the CV-related parts of the site.

I suspect it'll be at least the weekend before I actually upload the work site.

In reading through the previous entries, I see that I haven't made clear that the site I'm working on is purely work-related. It's intended as a forum in which I can provide more information than a CV can convey. That way, if a prospective employer wants to know more about me, they can find out at their convenience. It ought to be very straightforward, but there's an unexpected challenge--I feel like an egomaniac. Since the whole point is to present my accomplishments and my skills, it feels like page after page of me, me, me, aren't I great. But that's the purpose of a CV, even one on the web: to present one's accomplishments. Excessive modesty and self-deprecation will obscure the point completely, and defeat the purpose. So I have to grit my teeth and keep on. (Although if I were to decide that it's just too impolite to say anything good about myself, I could simply upload one blank page and be done very quickly...)

Anyway, in addition to the work site, I also have the rudiments of a personal site, which I began months ago, but which has been largely static since. That's where this diary will eventually go, when I do post it. So although I'm working like mad on the work site, the personal site is untouched at the moment, and it will probably be some time before I am able to work on it. Clearly the work site is the priority. On the other hand, I can't (and don't) work on move preparation tasks all the time; maybe I'll find some time. (Yes, I would consider working on a personal web site to be a relaxing break from working on moving. I did say at the outset that I wasn't a typical girl.)

Oh, I now have a final one-page CV, and a mostly-final two-page CV. It's strange. I thought the one-page CV would be difficult, because I've always had trouble paring my résumé down to one page. But in the actual event, once I'd brutalized the CV into the one-page format, I started to like it. It seems very streamlined and readable. Thereafter, as I worked on the two-page format, I felt like I was including a lot of information that didn't have the same impact. I ended up leaving out a great deal of material that was on the original résumé. Some of it I replaced (using ideas that worked themselves out while working on the site and the one-page CV), but I was able to leave some out entirely, so the two-page CV has a much cleaner look to it.

I am completely absorbed in working on the site and the CV. Other than work, and email to Mike, I'm not paying attention to anything else. I work on it for a few minutes over breakfast in the morning, and when I come home, I turn on the computer before I even turn on the lights. Although, come to think of it, I've been doing that since about mid-February... :-)

I'd say there's some good momentum here.

Hmm. Another late night.

Completed at 12:56 AM

Tuesday, 19 September

It looks like I get the night off from diary entries, because the remnants of a hurricane have just arrived here quite suddenly, and the sky is falling. Noisily, and with lots of ostentatious flashing.

Maybe I'll shut down now...

Completed at 11:42 PM

Wednesday, 20 September

Today's unifying theme was traffic...

This morning I was merrily tooling along when I hit completely stopped traffic just south of 128. (All right, I encountered stopped traffic, I didn't actually hit it.) This extent of traffic after about 8:00 AM is quite unusual. Fortunately I know a lot of alternate routes in that area, so I bailed from the highway and only took about 25 minutes extra to get to work instead of the hour or so that sitting in the traffic would have taken.

Then, this afternoon, I left a bit early because a book I ordered from Amazon (the O'Reilly HTML Pocket Reference, appropriately enough) has arrived and is at the management office, so I wanted to get there before they closed. And, amazingly, just north of 128, right where the traffic usually thins out, it became stop-and-go the rest of the way home. Unfortunately I don't know a lot of alternate routes in that area, so it ended up taking over an hour to get here, and I pulled in just in time to see the property manager get in her car and drive off. Rats. I wish I'd been 15 seconds earlier...or 15 seconds later.

But, on a cheerier note, I then spent nearly two hours on the phone with Mike, which was especially nice because it's been since Saturday. With the time difference, weeknight calls sometimes aren't easy to coordinate. I'm often just getting home at about the same time he starts thinking of turning in.

It was also nice because he stayed on the phone later than he should have, which is always very complimentary... :-)

You might think the separation would be unbearable. I do miss him, but it's a background task most of the time, and stays at a tolerable level. This is no doubt partly because once I start concentrating on something, I forget everything else--a very handy ability, I highly recommend it--but also because the extreme distance involved makes our situation different from most long-distance relationships. I don't see him on weekends, so I don't go through constant up-and-down cycles. I know it's going to be weeks before I see him again, so there's a certain resignation. Pining won't solve anything; I might as well get something useful done in the meantime.

It also helps a lot that I know exactly when I'll be seeing him again. If we had no fixed plans, and things were completely open-ended, I'd probably be in a far worse state. Some days are definitely harder than others, but a good telephone call will generally fix everything.

Plus I can hardly complain; it's now only slightly over three weeks until I go back there. Oh, didn't I mention that before? I'll be in England for the last two weeks of October, during which time we'll be doing, you know, the M thing. Just something else to check off on the to-do list, really.

Yet more work on the site, although content changes are becoming less frequent; now I'm mostly addressing formatting and consistency issues. Tangentially from which, I really should create a Diary section on the personal site and put all of this text there, even though the site isn't posted yet. Right now, I'm typing all this in a word processor, which is almost certainly going to come back to haunt me. The word processor is more convenient for typing (because it's a more familiar environment than HTML, at present anyway), but I know that when I eventually do convert it to HTML, it's going to get mangled in the process and I'll have a lot of cleanup to do. The sooner I change over and start writing entries in HTML to begin with, the less cleanup there will ultimately be.

Frustratingly, Mike has written !Diary, an excellent web diary production app, which is exactly what I need; but I can't run it because his platform of choice is RISC OS. I've seen how much work he has put into its development, so I'm not keen on the idea of writing my own. I can't seem to convince him to port it to Windows NT...

(Hmm, a quick web search has not yielded any RISC OS emulators for Windows platforms.)

Completed at 12:26 AM

Thursday, 21 September

More traffic in weird places on the way home tonight. There must be something going on north of here that is causing tailbacks clear to 128.

There is a certain white-knuckle entertainment to be had in dense, stop-and-go traffic when the driver behind you is someone who looks at their passengers while conversing with them...especially back-seat passengers.

I spent an hour or so on the phone with Linda tonight, mostly talking about personality types and sleep patterns. (As separate topics, not as they relate to each other. If they even do relate to each other.) That was fun; there aren't that many people I know who like to converse on such esoteric subjects.

Work today was mostly occupied with solving little problems as they came up. I did find out why I've been getting this spate of direct support calls recently--apparently the new receptionist is forwarding people to me if the Help Desk doesn't answer the phone.

I also finished up a QuickTime WinInstall. I'd prefer to roll it out as a plugin during the IE5.5 upgrade process, but in order to do that I need a silent install, and it turns out that Apple won't provide a silent install unless you register as a developer. I'm not clear on the thought process behind that one. Well, it turned out to be a very simple WinInstall. I'd thought that, being an audio/video app, it might create a bunch of hardware-specific registry entries, but it didn't do that; it's an entirely generic installation. Now I need to test it on a few different kinds of computers, just to be sure; after that, it's done.

Completed at 10:11 PM

Friday, 22 September

Day number three of atypical traffic on the way home. Much more of this, and it won't be atypical any more.

I forgot to mention yesterday that I resumed my investigation into multisystem VCRs. You see, the US and UK don't use the same TV standards. Ours is NTSC, theirs is PAL, and ordinary TVs and VCRs are designed to support one or the other. However, you can buy a multisystem VCR, which can play several different formats of VHS tape, including NTSC and PAL. You're not out of the woods just yet, though, because the signal the VCR puts out is the same as the tape it's playing, i.e. playing an NTSC tape outputs an NTSC signal. But, conveniently for us, it so happens that newer PAL TVs, those that support PAL-60, can apparently handle an NTSC signal anyway. The idea, therefore, is to buy a multisystem VCR, so that I can usefully bring my videotapes.

I looked into multisystem VCRs a week or two ago, but got sidetracked by other move-related topics. Yesterday I got on the case again. Via a tedious investigative process, I have determined that they are all just about identical, in terms of their multi-platform support (although that wasn't at all clear from looking at their differently-organized descriptions). Sadly, the selection criteria must then come down to other features, which (as you know, if you've ever bought a VCR) are mostly gibberish. Hmm, shall I go for one with S-Mecha? How about APC II? Or--this is my favorite--Reality Regenerator! That one could really come in handy; reality indisputably needs tweaking occasionally.

I'm sure these features mean something to someone, but I can't help harboring a deep suspicion that they are just names that the marketing department came up with this year. And really, it's not worth becoming an expert for the sake of a relatively inexpensive item that we probably won't even use all that often. So, given that they will all do what I want (play both NTSC and PAL tapes), I've settled on one that is relatively inexpensive for the number of gibberish features it has.

But, since Mike has much greater A/V knowledge than I do, I'm going to run it by him before I actually buy one. There may be audio features that matter to him, about which I know nothing.

So that was yesterday. Today, it is definitely fall; yesterday was about 85, today, about 65. I keep hearing and seeing geese flying south as well. Sigh.

This evening, I have done nothing but relax. I read a large chunk of Diaspora, which so far is turning out even better than I expected, and watched a movie. Now I think I'll read for another couple of hours and then turn in.

Completed at 10:47 PM

Saturday, 23 September

Way back in July, while Mike was here in fact, my apartment complex took it into its anthropomorphized head to redecorate. We came back from Cape Cod to find that in the hallways, the wallpaper and lighting fixtures had been taken down, and the carpet ripped out. As they put up the new décor, the last thing to be done was the placement of new carpeting. I've never installed carpeting before, so I don't know anything about it, but apparently it involves some kind of glue. I know this because when they ripped up the old carpeting, a dried-out, bumpy glue surface was left behind; I also saw them applying glue to the floor in preparation for putting down the new carpet.

A few days ago, several child-sized bare footprints (individual toes discernible), made of carpet glue, appeared on the stairs in the stairwell. Oh dear.

This comes to mind right now because a few minutes ago, the postal carrier, who unexpectedly had a package for me, rang my buzzer. I hadn't ordered anything; what could it be? I dashed down the stairs (chuckling at the glue-prints along the way) to collect it. It turned out to be a CNE certificate from Novell, this one in celebration of my recently passing the NetWare 5 CCR exam. Well, that's a relief, anyway; it's one thing to take and pass the test, and another thing entirely to be sure that you've really done all that was necessary. Receipt of a certificate represents fairly solid confirmation that I'm still in good standing, I'd say.

(much later)

A momentous occasion today (drum roll please): I actually uploaded the work-related site to Mike's old Demon web space. Wow. Not that I'm falling into the trap of thinking it's done or anything so foolish; no, this is just the beginning of the next round of revision and restructuring. But still, it is a milestone.

Spent a couple of hours on the phone with Mike this afternoon, which always leaves me in a vaguely elated state in which I can't concentrate or sit still. This worked out OK, though, because while we were on the phone, Mike mentioned that he'd used the New Car to go to the supermarket, and had therefore had Tesco's pepperoni pizza for dinner. Typically, this set off a rapid series of tangents in my head, starting with thinking how good a pizza sounded (and here you thought they were only for your sense of taste), followed by the fact that the only pizza place that delivers to this building happens to be one whose pizza I don't like, chased quickly by the conclusion that I'd have to go pick up a pizza myself, culminating with a blinding explosion of enlightenment when I recalled that there's an excellent Thai place right next door to the pizza place. Well, there was nothing for it after that; Thai food it had to be. Therefore, once we hung up the phone, I was able to get in the car and go drive for a bit, which always helps work off some of that post-call elation. (Especially if I select the musical accompaniment appropriately.)

Something amusing I've noticed that happens whenever I talk to Mike on the phone--I mentally synchronize watches. If I look at the clock during the call, I automatically change the time into UK time, without thinking about it. Therefore, by the time we hang up, I'm so used to thinking that it's midnight or 1 AM or whatever that it sometimes comes as quite a surprise to discover that for me, it's still only 7 PM.

Distressingly, I now have lots of excellent leftover Thai red curry. Whatever shall I do?

Completed at 12:58 AM

Sunday, 24 September

I have just realized something: Today didn't really exist.

Today was actually just Part II of yesterday. (Yesterday--The Sequel!) I worked on the web site quite a lot, spent three hours on the phone with Mike :-), had leftovers from yesterday's lunch for lunch today, and had leftovers from yesterday's dinner for dinner today (that'd be the Thai food, as you may recall). Yesterday, I meant to order the multisystem VCR we settled on, but forgot; today...well, you can guess.

So clearly, today is just yesterday, only more so.

QED.

One thing different from yesterday--four calls from telemarketers within ten minutes. I get a lot of them, but that's an unusually high density even for me. What was especially strange was that the last two both clearly only had a name of "L Nelson" in front of them, because they guessed at the first name (Larry and Lolita, I kid you not) rather than using the usual "Mrs. Nelson" cop-out.

I wonder what I did lately that got my name onto a new calling list?

Fairly strong tingling in my right hand this afternoon and evening. That's OK, it has happened before, and it'll go away as soon as I stop abusing my hand.

Completed at 10:14 PM

Monday, 25 September

Last night I had trouble sleeping. This is, I'm sorry to say, not all that unusual. Left to my own devices, I live on about a 30-hour day, so every night, I'm not tired; and every morning, I don't want to get up yet. This is manageable, especially if I keep to a fairly regular schedule; but when I'm deeply immersed in a project, it becomes worse. I'm just getting some serious momentum and starting to do very good work--and then I have to go to bed. It's hard to fall asleep when my mind is racing around, thinking about the project, and more often than not, coming up with really good ideas. How can I stay in bed when I'm having inspirations? What if I don't remember them in the morning? (This is a greater danger than it might seem; after the first five or six ideas, it's possible to overlook a few.)

I blame my resultant foggy state for the fact that I forgot to turn in my $*#! timesheet on time. I completely spaced on the fact that it was Monday. (The company, since it gets its revenues primarily by billing staff time, takes a dim view of staff failing to turn timesheets in promptly. A couple of years ago they instituted a policy of deducting $100 per late timesheet from the offender's annual bonus. Bonuses are issued at fiscal year end. It just so happens that the fiscal year ends this Saturday. This was the last timesheet of the fiscal year, and I forgot to turn it in. Whew! I almost missed costing myself $100!)

Today, I remembered about ordering a multisystem VCR--and amazingly, I thought of it during business hours! So I called, and placed my order, and got to the delivery address, and the guy said "England? You don't want to ship it to England. It'll cost a fortune." Turns out a fortune is about $150, plus I'd be assessed 14% customs duty, plus 17.5% VAT, plus VAT on the customs duty!

All this for an item that costs $260.

Maybe not.

Back to the drawing board.

From the beginning, I'd have preferred to find a reseller within the UK, because I knew that shipping and customs were potential problems; but none have ever showed up during my web searches. Today, a bit more intense scrutiny revealed that Alta Vista, at least, has a separate UK-specific search engine. I knew some search engines had country-specific sub-engines, but I thought that when searching from the main site, it included everything. Apparently this isn't so, because as soon as I started searching on the UK Alta Vista site, I suddenly started finding hordes of UK resellers who stock multisystem VCRs. (Interestingly, not so from Yahoo's UK engine.) As I should have expected, though, it turns out that the major manufacturers all have entirely different lines within the UK, so all the models I've evaluated don't exist there.

So, completely back to square one. Pretty soon, I'm going to close my eyes and point.

Work today was mostly occupied with preparing this year's ACE (Annual Compensation Evaluation). This is an app I wrote, now in its sixth year of use. The staff managers use ACE to do year-end salary reviews. Anyway, I spent much of today making this year's app changes and validating the data. Tomorrow I'll roll ACE out in all offices; the data will go to the office managers later this week.

More work on the site this evening, although things seem to have entered the mop-up phase. I'm tweaking details, mostly. I wouldn't call it done yet, but then it's the kind of thing that is never truly finished anyway.

Still trouble with the right wrist. Today it's a bit worse than yesterday, but then I haven't let off it at all, so that isn't surprising. I should probably work on some non-computer-based things from the to-do list for a while.

Completed at 10:27 PM

Tuesday, 26 September

Last night I slept wonderfully...due in large part to the fact that for the first time in ages, I forgot to set my alarm before I went to bed. I'd have been very late indeed except that I woke myself up trying to get out of a horrible dream. Not a good start to the day, overall.

But it hasn't lived down to its original promise, I must say. Work was trouble-free; I finished up ACE and pushed it to all the offices. I also began setting up the user side of an FTP site. Today we met with our firewall consultant to decide how to secure the FTP site, and more importantly the server it's on, so now that I know how it will (and won't) be accessible, I can begin developing a simple, hassle-free process for the staff.

The wrist is still worsening, so I have arranged to take tomorrow as a sick day to give it a chance to rest. I'd rather not, but considering that everything I do at work requires use of a mouse and keyboard, I suspect it'll be very bad if I push it till the weekend. So tomorrow I will go do some of the other, less fun errands I've been putting off, which mostly involve shopping. That will keep me out of the house and away from the keyboard, which is about the only way I'll leave it alone.

It looks like RedHotAnt and MediaOne aren't on speaking terms again. No email from Mike this evening, except one message that limped in at about 8:30, even though it was sent around 5:00. An nslookup of various RedHotAnt servers also fails most of the time. This has happened before, back in June, I think it was. Whatever he sent will eventually trickle in, but it has taken as long as 48 hours before. Perhaps MediaOne wants me to ease up on the wrist too...

Oh yes, another telemarketer guessing at my first name this morning (Letitia this time). This one called just seconds before I got in the shower, which is good timing, because I'd have been far crankier if I'd gotten out of the shower to answer the phone.

Completed at 12:33 AM

Thursday, 28 September

No diary entry yesterday, because I did indeed stay home to give the wrist a rest (wrest?), and I thought that writing an entry would have violated the spirit of things. The hand is a lot better today, although last night I was getting a bit worried, because it didn't seem much better at that point. Today at work I tried to stick to activities with less keyboard content, which seems to have helped further.

On the grounds that it didn't involve a keyboard, I spent most of yesterday shopping--not one of my favorite things to do, it must be said. My primary purpose for shopping was to get business clothes, at which I had absolutely zero success. Sigh. I hate clothing-shopping. Where's Mel when I need her?

I did have other things on the shopping list as well, some of which I managed to get. However, I can report that absolutely nobody here sells CV-quality A4 paper. That's all right; somehow I expect it will be plentiful in England. It would have been nice to bring some copies already printed, but on the bright side, this will mean less to lug in my luggage.

One of the stores where I did some shopping was Victoria's Secret. I actually thought to ask them whether they have any stores in the UK. Their answer was an extremely sheepish "No". Vindication! I knew their British-ness was an affectation!

Mike's missing email from Tuesday still hasn't showed up. Yesterday he re-sent new copies (all of which arrived immediately), so I do have the messages, which is good. It just goes to show that the Internet is, in many ways, like the postal system. You throw a message out there; after that, you have no idea what happens to it, and no control over when (or even whether) it arrives at its destination.

Today I got a phone bill that lists a 231-minute phone call to Mike in August. Wow, nine minutes short of four hours! I have no doubt that this statistic would cause a certain degree of astonishment among Mike's friends and family who met me while I was in England, because I'm quite introverted and was somewhat subdued when I met most of them. (Not by choice; I just never know what to say.) They probably can't imagine me talking for four minutes, let alone four hours. My friends and family might have the same reaction, because Mike was similarly quiet while he was meeting people here. And yet, by ourselves, we can talk a blue streak.

Completed at 11:19 PM

Friday, 29 September

Heh. This is my first entry typing directly in HTML instead of the word processor. Not that you can see the difference, but I sure can...

David has a cold. Eric has a cold. Mike has a cold. This morning I began sneezing constantly, followed by a very swift onset of sore throat and chills. Hmm. What could it be? Well, I doubt I caught it from Mike, anyway. So when I got home, I went straight to sleep for about two hours. I'm feeling rather better now, but I can tell that my thermostat is seriously out of whack. I go from freezing to roasting with no warning. I plan to medicate myself with copious tea. Speaking of which, a tea crisis is looming on my horizon. I am nearly out of The Good Stuff; I'll run out tomorrow sometime. I have various other tea around the house, but no more British Tetley. I have American Tetley in the amazing waterproof teabags; I have a few English Breakfast teabags; and I have some PG Tipps. None of these are bad, but I'm really fond of the Real Thing. But at some point I have to stop restocking the kitchen and start using up what I have, and I think this is it; the tea I have ought to be enough to last me all the way to the end of November.

Back on the subject of colds for a moment, I thought Jaime had a cold too, because he was out yesterday, but it turns out that one of his roommates was hit by a cement truck while riding his bicycle and is in the hospital. I have no idea how I made it through the whole day yesterday without having my misapprehension corrected. I wonder how Jaime is dealing.

My hand is much better today. Another day or two of taking it easy should be the end of it. I will definitely take this warning to heart, though, and not be quite so relentless in my work at the computer. This could be difficult, though: home with a cold for the weekend, and trying to stay away from the computer. Yipe. Well, the kitchen could use some cleaning, and there's always laundry to do.

This weekend I do plan to tackle at least one computer-related project: getting this diary posted. If I go much longer, there will be such a backlog of entries that I'll frighten people off. Of course that means I have to knock the rest of the personal site into some kind of postable shape, but that's OK; it sounds like fun to me. It's a good frustration.

Completed at 9:57 PM

Saturday, 30 September

One of the first things I did after we decided that I would move to the UK was to make a frighteningly detailed list of stuff I own. We used this list to decide which items I should bring and which would be unnecessary duplicates, or wouldn't fit in Mike's house. I've retained an international moving company to handle the packing and shipping of the items that are coming with me, but the rest I will pack myself, and put in storage on this side of the ocean. That makes packing a bit of a challenge, because I have to pack only the storage stuff, and not miss anything, while leaving the rest untouched. But voila: the detailed list already shows which items are staying and which going, so at least I don't have to keep it all in my head. (The information, that is, not the stuff itself. Well, not the stuff either. Oh, never mind.)

In the process of creating the list, I noticed quite a few items that shouldn't go to either place (England or storage) because I really don't need or want them any more. Today I began weeding those items. This is noteworthy because up to now it's pretty much been paperwork, phone calls, and fiddling with the computer. Now I'm starting in on the physical business of packing and moving.

I also read for quite some time today. I finished Diaspora on Thursday (and it was astonishingly good, especially if you happen to think that physics is fun), and started Vurt, by Jeff Noon, yesterday. It's a complete change of pace from Diaspora...it's beyond surreal. I couldn't possibly begin to describe it without first taking some serious recreational pharmaceuticals (at which point nobody would understand my description anyway...which would be just about right). One amusing thing about it is that it's set in Manchester, which is very near where Mike lives, so for Mike, reading Jeff Noon is like me reading Stephen King.

And, not surprisingly, I then spent most of the evening organizing the personal site into semi-postable shape. There's still a lot to do, so I may end up leaving "under construction" markers in various places. No complaints from the wrist at this, which is good; I reorganized my keyboard/mouse arrangements a bit, and I think that's helped. Also, I'm taking it very easy.

Completed at 12:02 AM