I got home last night and our new corner desk from OfficeMax still has not arrived. The one to three days of shipping has now turned into a week and two days and nothing so I called OfficeMax to find out what was going on. They had no idea and said that the warehouse would call me back since there was no tracking information or anything indicating that the order had been processed at all. But we did not hear back from the warehouse.
After learning when I got home that the fire drills that we were promised were over were continuing without any hiccup at all I decided that it was time to have a blog dedicated to living here at 1180 so that I would have a more useful place to talk about these issues so I have no created 1180 Newark: The 1180 Raymond Boulevard Blog. Already SGL is one of the most authoritative blogs about 1180 Raymond Blvd. anyway so I am guessing that this will really solidify us as THE place for downtown Newark residential news.
I got home and found Dominica playing Age of Empires: Age of Kings on her Nintendo DS. She is starting to get into it and we are hopeful that it will be “the” head to head Nintendo DS game for us. We have two copies just to check it out.
Dominica made veggie pizza burgers and broccoli for dinner. We watched some <em>Father Ted</em> and relaxed. We made it down to the gym at a decent time tonight – around twenty until ten. That was a much better time than a quarter after ten like we normally seem to do. That little bit makes a big difference.
Before going to sleep Dominica played a little more Age of Empires: Age of Kings on the DS and I loaded up and listened to Chris Spurgeon’s recent talk on “The Best Geo Hacks of the Last 2,000 Years” which was very interesting. I love IT Conversations. ITC really demonstrates the power of podcasting. This particular seminar was about twenty-five minutes in length and is great for both history and science buffs.
This morning I got up and got down to the gym a little on the late side. I did a short thirty-five minute workout and Dominica and Oreo were already gone by the time that I got back to the apartment. I was very happy when I weighed in today as I have remained at pretty much 18 – 18.5 lbs loss for almost a week but today I dropped dramatically down to 19.5 lbs. I am excited as 20 lbs is a major barrier to push through and I could be there by the weekend if I work hard enough.
For some reason today (and last night on my desktop at home) WordPress 2.2 suddenly started working correctly. Ever since I did my last update to version 2.2 I have not had the normal visual editing toolbar available to me. It was obvious that it was supposed to be there but it wasn’t actually there and I had to do everything by hand. But on a Firefox restart suddenly, after over a week of it not working, suddenly my editing font has changed and the visual editing toolbar has appeared. Very strange indeed.
Today was not nearly as busy at the office as things have been for the past few days. Much more of a normal day.
There is a really good article on Slashdot today talking about ISPs and Goodmail extorting money to deliver email that you have already paid to receive. It really helps put into perspective the issues with ISPs constantly trying to bill everyone for the same services over and over again (think net neutrality.) The whole concept behind Goodmail is that even if you have paid to have an email service the company that provides your email service can charge people sending you email (that you already paid for) in order to deliver it. Much like you paying for an office in an office building but your visitors having to pay a troll standing at the front door in order to get in to see you. You wouldn’t be very happy to find out that your office or store front had someone charging people to approach you (this is commonly known as extortion) and why should you be any less upset if your Internet Service Provider is doing the same thing?
On the science front, Italian scientists have discovered matter traveling at more than 99.9% the speed of light (a.k.a. .999C.) Matter traveling at these speeds is expected to experience very little movement within time which makes it that much more interesting.
I found a really interesting site today that has some great statistics on Africa’s Internet penetration. It is amazing how little penetration there is even in relatively developed nations like South Africa.
I downloaded a bunch of IT Conversations podcasts and a few Audible books to get my Treo set up and ready to actually be used. I am really looking forward to being able to use it as a viable audio platform.
I mentioned yesterday that Apple has released the Safari web browser for Windows users. One thing that I was not previously aware of about the “SoW” was that Apple has also ported over their font rendering technology which is different from the Windows font rendering system. So now that we have Safari and Internet Explorer (or Firefox) running side by side on the same platform we can compare apples to Apples and see which font rendering system really is better. Joel Spolsky dives into the font comparison question and looks carefully to see what is being done differently. Interesting stuff for all of your amateur typographers out there.
Earlier today I was reading Scott Adams’ Dilbert Blog where he was talking about “How I Solved the Energy Problem” and I left a comment about my own article on “The Future of Transportation.” Believe it or not, by mid-day Scott Adam’s blog is the number one referrer to SGL and almost everyone over here today is checking on the transportation essay. Very cool. I love how the Internet works.
And now, after discussing the spelling of culottes, I am getting people coming to SGL looking for coolats in addition to koolats! I am becoming a clearing house for misspelled skorts inquiries.
I wrapped up the day and figured that I will have a busy evening so I am posting and heading for home. It is a quarter until six and Dominica and I have a lot of cleaning to do tonight before the Ralstons come down to visit on Friday. They are arriving during the day so we only have tonight and tomorrow to clean. I will be working from home tomorrow with Oreo as I usually do on Thursdays.
Weight Lost So Far: 19.5lbs