A rapid Friday...

I showed up early for the weekly ham-as-in-amateur-radio breakfast -- my first in about two months -- and had a pretty good time. I got fairly well caught up with the local gossip (the stuff you won't read in the paper!) and managed to summarize my jaunt to the other side of the world without monopolizing the conversation.

After that, I opened the store and held the fort until Drew arrived, at which point I went home and chased paper for a while. I went in at the end of the day, too, for a couple of hours (and it looks as if Galina and I will be holding the fort tomorrow, too, while the kids go off to a friend's wedding, where Huntür will be the flower girl). Fortunately, none of the organizations our store is associated with (USPS, UPS, FedEx) will be making deliveries or pickups on Monday, so that means all of us will have a rare two days off in a row.

* * *This evening, to keep the brain cells functioning, I incorporated a photo plugin for my WordPress blog, which I am using as a sort of test bed for understanding how the code works and as a repository for journal items that pre-date my start with LiveJournal. (I've already demonstrated that it's easy to import LJ data into the application, using my first few posts in 2000 as a trial.) Part of the incorporation process, in fact, involved tracking down a bug in the plugin code, and I'm feeling somewhat good about that because I'm not a real expert with PHP.

* * *Continuing in a technical vein, after a few days' use, I've decided I like FeedDemon, which is a program that lets you keep track of RSS feeds and display (and theoretically save) the contents of associated pages. The bottom line is this: it lets me check out a series of regular haunts fairly quickly. The only negative I've bumped up against is the fact that some sites I like to visit don't have an RSS feed, which means I must visit them "the old fashioned way," and which naturally cannot be considered a flaw in the FeedDemon program.

* * *This past week has been fairly stress-free (if you don't count having to wade through a seeminly endless pile of paper), with no calls from clients. For reasons known only to my subconscious -- which isn't blabbing -- this situation makes me a bit nervous, likely spurred on by an email reply I received today that says a tentative assignment I had discussed prior to my Kazakhstan trip would now appear to be a definite "no." Feht, I think, would emphathize, but he is -- if the calendar doesn't lie -- traveling abroad for a while (in Turkey, if memory serves).

Doubtless, I shall have to lift myself up and get my butt in gear next week... but that's next week. It's not often I get a chance to relax, so I shall give it my best shot in the coming few days.

Cheers...