Sleep shifting...

...is a drag.

I fell asleep last night, as I had intended, at around 9:20 pm. I've been up since shortly after 4 am this morning, trying to stay warm (it's probably in the high 30s right now) and continuing to configure my new laptop. Today, I'll move my sleep up by 6 hours or so, with the intention of getting up in time to make it to the MCC by 11 pm for an all-night shift.

I've got the Palm Desktop installed working, along with BackupBuddyNG. Also, I took a chance and installed Office 97, but without Word since the newer Word 2000 came preinstalled on the machine. After the fact, both Word 2000 and (at least) Excel 97 appear to work fine.

One thing I noticed on the screen this morning was a new shortcut on my Desktop to something last night's DVD apparently installed on my hard drive ("PCFriendly DVD"). I am not at all sure I was consulted about this installation, unless it was buried in the legalese I had to agree to in order to view the feature.

Finally, I note with concern a tendency for the machine to slow down considerably, to the point where screen updates take upwards of a couple of minutes. I notice this behavior has only occurred when the laptop is connected to my home network; I had the machine at the sim yesterday and used it all day to work on coming back up to speed in terminology, with no such slowdowns. I hope these are somehow anomalous occurrences (ever the software engineer, deep down inside!).

The immediate plan is to get well and truly bundled up and then go for an hour's walk. I then plan to spend the rest of the morning doing some planning, reviewing some documents I have to edit, and making a few more phone calls to some old contacts.

Cheers...

Wow, what a short "day"...

Here it is, a little after noon, and only about 3 hours left until "bedtime." I've employed the classic blackout procedure - aluminum foil over the windows - in the "spare" bedroom (which is how I've begun to think of it now that Lee hardly spends any time here, but I digress..).

Otherwise, the day has gone by way too fast.

This morning's walk was pleasant, though I felt it necessary to wear a leather jacket and scarf to keep the cold at bay. Upon my return, I determined that letting Ming, our Peke, out for a walk in our back yard allowed him to not only take care of business, but also to gather every remaining flea that has survived the cold so far. (Pekes are particularly well-built for this task, being low to the ground and hairy.) I shampooed the pooch, and watched several score small, stunned, bloodsucking insects get washed down the bathtub drain. And I'm sure I didn't get them all.

I confirmed tonight's assignment and continued to configure the laptop. I also knocked some items off my to-do list. (You can tell I'm simply not used to posting in the middle of the day, can't you? :^)

My Panasonic IC Recorder is a small device that will store up to 60 minutes of sound in up to 99 different "memos" that are time- and date-stamped. It is so small that it easily disappears into my junk; the last time it crossed my path was this past August (in fact, I mentioned it in my post on Writing about talking...).

The first recording was over a year old. It was made in Russia, as I was standing in a grocery store. As I was waiting to check out, I found it amusing that both candy and condoms were on display next to the cash register, in the "impulse buy" zone. Whenever I run across such tidbits in my travels, I casually unlimber the recorder and note whatever there is to note.

I notice however, that I have a tendency to hasten through the important parts, or maybe it's that the important ("punchy") parts are so brief. At the end of the same recording, I noted a man standing in front of me, in jeans and a jean jacket, 50-ish, gray hair, with a black baseball cap that says - and here I say whatever it is so fast, I can not, at this later date, make it out. It sounds like "space-throw"; maybe it's "Spice Girls"? In the future, I'll have to remember to slow down and make sure the message is captured properly.

In any event, I can't really spend a lot of time listening to old recordings, so maybe I'll do one per day (there's 39 of them) or something similar.

I've cooked a huge container of rice that I hope will keep me nourished over the weekend. For variety, I've laced the rice with reconstituted, store-bought shiitake mushrooms and the last of my picked-in-the-wild Sarcodon imbricatum, for a little variety. All I have left to do in the culinary department is to cook the rest of the red meat I bought the other day, and I'll be set for the weekend.

Cheers...