To: Me
From: Assistant Director for Personnel
Date: January 30, 2006
Subject: Perfect Record Award

Congratulations, your excellent record for 2005 has earned you the CyRide Perfect Record Award. The criteria for this award is:

• No preventable accidentss in the past year
• No attendance violations in the past year
• No complaints in the past year
• No reprimands or suspensions in the past year
• No violations or accidents on state driving record in the past year
• 8 or fewer illnesses during the past year

You will receive a Perfect Record Award pin and a $10 bonus on your next paycheck.

Good Job!!!

So, new plugin-coding work left the page looking not so spiffy overnight. Sorry ’bout that.

All is now right with the world. Robin Hood: Men in Tights is due out on DVD in April.

A few tidbits.

• The wait for my new computer is killing me.
• Maggie and I are moving up to Somerset in August, contingent upon lease signage. Bigger kitchen, washer and dryer in unit, everything paid except electric, for about the same as we’re paying now. And the building is newer, so hopefully the insulation will be better and the appliances more energy-efficient, meaning electric bill savings.
• Trainer job was posted at work. We’ll see what happens.

Does anybody who reads this use a desktop resolution of less than 1024×768? My original site design was for an 800×600 display area (the body box is 720px wide); however, due to the fact that all of the sidebar content I want to add is, well, outgrowing the sidebar, I’m considering increasing the width to 960px (just about right for a maximized 1024×768 window) and adding a second sidebar column to hold all of the newsfeed and other content that I’m considering adding.

//edit: Eh, I was bored. Let me know what you think.

Updated as class goes on tonight.

• Classical conditioning theory is based on dog drool.
• The pain from a nail through the foot is an unconditioned response. Fancy that.
• Positive Punishment: I flirt with you, you slap my face, not going to go THERE again.
• Professor wears mike. Professor forgets to remove mike as he goes to the restroom. Hilarity ensues.
• “You know, corporal punishment doesn’t work later on, when they get big… I mean, I can’t imagine spanking my 18-year-old… I mean, you’d need to like, take a gun and go that way.”
• “My mother-in-law is like that. You can yell her head off. ‘Yelling voice is for the bedroom!’”

Man I’m going to enjoy the resolution upgrade from 1024×768 to 1440×900… it’s nuts trying to juggle a web browser, notes page, buddy list, and chat window on one screen.

The hard part about ordering a newly announced piece of hardware is the wait… I’m going nuts. I really hope it ships a few days earlier than the 15th, so I have it when I’m on a bus all day at the end of that week when we’re doing regional choir tour.

I have to say I don’t quite understand all the hoopla about Friday the 13th. I mean… what could be so bad about it? If you work for the government, it’s automatically payday!

MacBook Pro - 1.67GHz Intel Core Duo
Part Number: MA090LL/A
SuperDrive (DVD±RW/CD-RW)
512MB 667 DDR2 - 1 SO-DIMM
Backlit Keyboard/Mac OS - U.S. English
ATI Mobility Radeon X1600 - 128MB GDDR3
AirPort Extreme Card & Bluetooth
80GB Serial ATA drive @ 5400 rpm

Estimated time to ship: February
//edit: More “exact” shipping estimate: February 15.

• First day of school went pretty well. Vocal Pedagogy should be interesting. Really got right back into the swing of things though; choir council meetings coming right up, and all sorts of things to take care of in preparation for ISU Honor Choir.
• Converted the FeedBag plugin to object-oriented, my first successful OO experience. I have to say I think it worked out pretty well. Working on adding support for Atom and RSS v1 feeds, then I think I’ll release it for public consumption. If you wanna see the source as it is now, drop me a line.
• I think I’m going to love my work schedule this year. Yep. Oh yeah, remember how I said I only have a month left until my raise (at 3120 hours)? Yeah. As of the time I clocked out today, I have 3112.5 hours of CyRide experience. MONEY!!!
• MacWorld tomorrow. Possible new iBooks/PowerBooks/Mac Minis. Possible purchases of new iBooks/PowerBooks/Mac Minis. Trying to decide between a PowerBook and an iBook; about the only thing I can really see myself wanting a PB for now that I have the PowerMac is for the higher-resolution screen. We’ll see what happens. If there’s a Mac Mini released with DVR capabilities, it’s replacing the big box in the living room. Thank goodness for this raise I’m getting at the end of the week