Gloria and I took Duan to breakfast and the airport this morning. More accurately, Gloria drove Duan and me, and Duan treated Gloria and me. I sort of sat around and tried not to wince every time I moved. My back and neck have been incredibly sore! We went to the Cracker Barrel in Clinton, and breakfast was pretty good. Their grits were actually just fine, which Gloria says was not the case at the Fogelsville Cracker Barrel.

As I believe the kids say, “Mad props due.”

cwinters has been awesome enough to lend me his extra Kinesis Ergo Contour keyboard. Since I’ve got someone visiting this week, I’ve stuck to the simple split-key keyboard, so that I can continue to work as normal. The plan is to really start using it next week. Today, though, the guest left work for a few hours, feeling under the weather, so I hooked up the Kinesis and got to work. Sort of.

I called our accountant, today, to ask about my holiday availability. See, we get an extra week of paid time starting in our fifth year of employment. It’s weird: you don’t get it after five full years, but in the fifth year. So, if you’re hired in December, you only need to work for the company for about four years before you start having five extra days available. I, on the other hand, started in January of 2001.

I’ve put up another MSSQL-related module, Time::Piece::MSSQL. I’ve found myself writing very small modules that don’t do much except make my life easier. That’s good stuff. Like, I wrote an OO wrapper around Time::Duration that lets me deal with duration-in-seconds columns in my databases very easily. Schwern and Tony get beers when I see them next, for CDBI.

I really want to test drive a Kinesis Ergo. I hear (mostly) rave reviews, but I don’t want to buy a $250 input device, just to find that I can’t use it.

If the internet was a person, it would be a reverse Charlie (from Flowers for Algernon). It would start out as an interesting, convivial thinker and degrade into a dirty old man in a yellow raincoat yelling about “throat yogurt” and “herbal viagel.”

I’ve been annoyed at my performance at work these last two weeks. Yesterday it was really coming to a head, as I was accomplishing too little /and/ was having incredible hand pain. I even put aside my beloved IBM m101 to use a Belkin split keyboard. So far, so good. I need to see if I can find one with the \ in the right place, though, above the carriage return.

Frame : CAAD2 Mountain HeadShok (color: smoke)

I have two scary noises to report one. One of them is the blather coming from the TV. It’s the final debate, and I wish we had politicians who were just a little frank. I want the debate to be like a spelling bee: the candidate has to say the question before and after answering, to remind the audience what he should be answering.