"my" kinesis

October 29, 2004

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.

praise be to our accountant

October 28, 2004

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.

mssql and other horrors

October 28, 2004

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.

ergonomic keyboards.

October 19, 2004

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.

a few random thoughts

October 18, 2004

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.”

a very mixed day

October 16, 2004

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.

scary noises

October 14, 2004

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.

abe.pm lives... almost

October 12, 2004

Today was to be the first ABE.pm meeting in six months. I got to Lehigh just a few minutes before seven, and at ten after, I was still alone. I called Phil, who I knew was en route, and he said we probably shouldn’t expect Jim or Steve. In other words, it was just Phil and I.

flip flopping

October 11, 2004

I used to be not allergic to cats, before I became allergic. Don’t vote for me!