So... I've been setting up a new message board to hopefully replace one that's going away this weekend. It's not totally done yet, as there are a few requests, and I'd like to get them done ASAP, hopefully most of them before everyone switches over. This is my list of things to do, so I don't have to keep going back through the different threads with requests to remind myself (I'm running on so little sleep right now, that I can barely remember my own name ). Nothing has any particular importance, but the easier it is the quicker it'll probably get done.

• Up the font size a bit (except maybe the headings themselves, since the subject can get pretty long)
• Add the option of sorting main topic list by topic creation date or last post date
• Add one-line text-only signatures to profiles that can be used in posts (see how the HTML tag filtering works, and add an option on what tags are allowed in sigs)
• Add meta tags for keywords so the board is more easily turned up in search engines, once a list of keywords is produced
• Come up with a better name
• Add the hr tag to the list of allowed tags in posts
• Change board to require an account to post (wait for approval, or at least lack of disapproval, first)
• Look into adding the ability to control the date and time format on
  • created date
  • last post date
  • post dates in thread
• Make the error page actually state the error

(I really need to make a "News" category...)

There's a new twist on the Nigerian money scam: linky. I can't believe anyone actually received this as an email, or if the writer was seriously trying to scam people... it simply reeks of parody. Serious or not, it's a great laugh to read.

My husband was on Battle.net in one of the Diablo II rooms, and a guy posted a link to a Flash thing [link removed; no longer exists] he did as a web assignment. It's 18 holes of putt-putt golf, and totally cool. It was well done: the play was easy, the physics seemed fairly accurate (I mean, come on, it's putt-putt!), and it had a couple neat levels.

Interestingly enough, I did way better at it than I ever have in my few trips to actually play putt-putt golf in real life. Those, I'm usually way over par. This one, well... click here to see my score I mean, first try, in spite of totally screwing up 2 levels, including 3 over on a par 2, I got under par. Totally beginner's luck of course... if I played it a second time (which I'm sure I will) I wouldn't do as well. But damn that was cool. Try it yourself, I think you'll like it.

I actually lost 5 more pounds since the last time I weighed myself. Huh. I have to say I'm stunned. While I didn't think I'd gained any over the holidays, I certainly wouldn't have thought I'd lost any. I mean, except for driving to and fro between the days shortly before and shortly after Christmas, I spent a whole lot of time doing a whole lot of nothin', as far as physical movement was concerned, and I ate a fair amount more than I had been of late. So... where did this come from? I didn't get in any rowdy snowball fights, tickle fights, etc., over the last few weeks. The only exercise I got between about Thanksgiving time and New Year's was in karate class once a week. I don't know how, but I weighed 5 pounds less when I weighed myself in the gym today. (This is the first time I'd even set foot in there for over a month.)

And here I was all thru Christmas and a little after, telling a couple people who asked, that no I doubted I'd lost any more pounds, wasn't likely, etc. But hey, I'm glad to be wrong about this one. Hopefully it means my metabolism is a little faster than it used to be, and that if I keep working at it (I have gone back to the usual smaller diet) I will be able to get rid of all the excess I'd like to shed. Heh, and if I can manage it, I'd love to have abs like Gwen Stefani. That would be very cool.

This article [link removed; no longer exists] talks about a new move by some music retailers to join together to offer digital content available in their stores and on the internet, basically jumping on the wave by providing a legal alternative to getting content online. Sounds like a great idea to me. After all, have you ever thought about buying an album because of this one really great song, only to listen to previews of other songs, or to hear from someone else, that the rest of the album sucks? So... unless that one song showed up as an over-priced single, or on a good movie soundtrack, the only way to get it is to either (a) pay for a whole album of crap, or (b) download it off the internet illegally. How great would it be to be able to get any songs you wanted from different albums, to pay for them? There are services that offer this, in limited fashion: you can pick 10 songs from a relatively small list of artists' albums, for something like $10-$15 bucks. The problem is, it's a horribly limited selection, and some people are hard pressed to find as many as 10 songs they want off of it that they both like and don't already own. Hopefully this group will take things like that into consideration. I might actually be willing to buy stuff that way. (I usually just don't bother buying the album, or downloading the song I want, if I don't like the rest, meaning the artist gets zip from me. If I could buy music by-the-song -- not just singles, but groups of songs -- artists would at least get money for the songs I did want. Not to mention, if they wanted to sell whole albums there'd be less pressure to just fill up an album with x number of songs, just to make it long enough.)

Ya know, I never would've thought of this. This article at CNN [link removed; no longer exists] talks about using printers to create skin and other tissues... isn't that wild? I mean, I'm all for it... it's just such an amazing concept it blows my mind. What will science come up with next?

Last night I was updating the site, particularly my nightly resolutions, as well as the column to the right to have the latest resolutions info, and *bam* I was getting 0 byte files. I couldn't figure out what was going on, since I hadn't changed anything, so I posted to MT's help forums asking if anyone had run into a similar problem. Well, someone answered that the only thing I could think of was that it could be a disk space problem. I had also thought about that, but the last time I checked with my friend he'd said that we'd used nowhere near his disk space or bandwidth quotas, so I'd thought that couldn't be the problem.

Seeing someone else have the same idea, made me think to go to the Worldzone support forums. Yep, it was a disk space problem: they'd had problems with disk quota being set wrong, or something to that effect -- others had noticed that they were suddenly way over their quotas, though they hadn't been before. Anyway, there were additional posts in that thread that indicated it'd finally been fixed some time overnight. So, I tried again, and everything went fine. So if you saw this page looking weird before about 1:30pm CST, that's why, and everything works now.

I found this picture posted on a forum I frequent (PvP Forum hosted on by the same guy who runs DeepFriedForums), and I thought it was just great. You definitely gotta check it out:

I have a nomination for "least usable website EVAR!!!" And I'm not talking about people's personal websites. They can do whatever the hell they want, and as long as it's accessible to them and the people they know for sure they want to use it, then who cares? I'm talking about a more high-profile website: Guinness World Records. Yes, they have a website. And no, it doesn't work. In fact, this isn't just a case of IE-shortsightedness: it doesn't work in IE 5, Netscape 4.7x, or Netscape 6 (I'm betting it won't work in Netscape 7 or IE 6 either, which I have at home.) I don't know what it would work in, actually.

The problems vary with the browser. Don't even bother loading it with Netscape 4.anything: you get a blank navy blue screen. They use the <iframe> tag (why, God only knows). Netscape 4 has never supported this; it's the web standard however and Netscape 6/7 and IE 5+ (maybe 4 too, dunno) all support it. HOWEVER, it allows for alternate content in case the source of the iframe dosen't load, or for browsers that don't support it (I'm guessing text-only browsers can't handle it at all either). That's where <ilayer> comes in, which is what Netscape 4 uses instead. So you just stick that set of tags nested inside the <iframe> tags (which automatically makes it "alternate content" as far as the iframe is concerned) and have that load. Not only that, this tag provides for alternate content in the same way. So, for browsers that don't support either (or hypothetically when the source of iframe or ilayer won't load) you put a little snippet of text of some sort inside the ilayer, perhaps with a link to alternate content, or a link at least to the page that's supposed to load, or a "your browser does not support this" message. I thought every web designer knew this stuff... guess not.

Okay, with that out of the way, I'll now list the problems with Netscape 6 (and possibly 7... after I test it out at home I'll edit this message if I find anything different, for better or worse) and IE 5 (again, I'll test it in IE 6 and see if anything's different).

Netscape 6:

1. This first one is relatively minor, but it also showcases that there are some rather basic things wrong with this site. There's a left section that obviously contains a search box with a tiny "go" graphic next to it. Above that, it's supposed to say "Find a world record". Below it, there are two short lines that are supposed to appear: "Enter key words separated by a space" and "e.g. pogo stick, longest fingernails". In Netscape 6, all three lines say "done". That's it, just "done". I don't know what was done, but obviously it wasn't done successfully.
2. Okay, so you still know it's a search box, right? Heh, at least it should be... when I type some words in and click the teeny (yes, teeny... the "go" is barely distinguishable in spite of being medium goldish orange text on very very dark navy blue) go button, it pops up a new window with just that same left navigation. Nothing changes on the previous page, nothing else loads on that new page.
3. The main page that loads initially, in the main screen, with the different teaser mini-articles with "more" links and pictures, doesn't scroll. They have their CSS rules set up somehow that the content is cut off to the exact size of the frame, so no scrollbars appear. I tried my "page down" button on my keyboard, which will scroll the content in spite of there not being anymore, and there was nothing under it. It was completely cut off, so nothing but blank space was underneath. Whoops...
4. There are navigation buttons at the top, which are one big flash animation so that the cute circles with words on them can drop down all cool and stuff. Yeah, well that's all you get out of 'em. You click on one, and only one thing changes: that same flash navigation reloads and does its bouncy stuff again. The main page doesn't change at all.
5. I did finally find a successful link that did something. Darned if I know what it was, but it brought up a registration screen (that scrolls just fine inside the iframe). It's free, they just want your first & last name, email address, and theres' a checkbox for whether you want their email newsletter (I unchecked it) and radio buttons for HTML or text formatting, and a submit button. I filled it out and entered it, and that seemed to work. However, I noticed there is no login button on the site, and in spite of putting a cookie on the machine so I don't have to register again (the page stated that it would put a cookie on so it would know who I am after registering) that page just comes up all over again, and it doesn't make any of their navigation magically work.
6. Their "contact us" form doesn't work. The page loads, but it won't submit. There's a Javascript error with their JS validation function. I'm sure I could figure it out, but it's not my job and I don't feel like it. Of course, with Javascript off, the form won't submit either (I'm guessing it's because if there's an onclick event on the submit, that always gets a "false" and fails to submit the form, which is a Netscape behavior I don't necessary like, but for Netscape 6 that's the way it works). So, I couldn't use it to tell them all the errors they have.

IE 5:

1. Being that there was no login button, I of course had to register all over again (which it let me do even with the identical information I supplied before... no "you already registered" message or anything). However, every time I try to get anywhere, in spite of the fact IE has all cookies enabled, without prompting even, it brings up the registration screen. And I know from the Nescaspe 6 registration that it does indeed set a cookie, so I imagine that's still happening. Evidently it doesn't know how to read its own cookies. Nice... basically, this means when I try to search or use the navigation buttons at the top, or anything I tried besides "contact us" I get that stupid registration form to fill out and I can't get anywhere.
2. Their submit page won't submit either. I filled everything out (I didn't mention before... they want you full mailing address, but their JS validation doesn't check to see if it's valid, it just makes sure it's not blank, so I just filled in crap), and the submit button did absolutely nothing. I got no error message at all, it just did absolutely nothing. So evidently their validation routine is f%$#ed.

So there are less things wrong with the site in IE than Netscape, so it was probably designed with IE in mind. But they still have some major, major bugs. I did manage to see one record on their site without the registration form popping up: the first three stories, under "daily records" had links, and those actually took me to the stories (evidently those are accessible without being registered, sort of "teasers" to entice you to register). But that's it. Even their FAQ brings up that damn registration page.

I did get to send them a "contact us" message in spite of their best efforts to hose their code though. (Two messages actually... I discovered the registration problem in IE after I wrote it, so I sent 'em another one.) Maybe what I did wasn't strictly legal (copyright and all), but basically I rewrote their form, minus the JS validation (I knew I wasn't leaving any fields blank that they wanted to have stuff in... even if all the text isn't valid, hehe). I took most of the fields (all the required ones, none of the optional ones, since I wasn't going to fill out my website of phone number, etc.) and put 'em in my own simplified table layout, and had the form pointing to the exact same place their form did. I named all the fields the same, capitalization included, and used all the attributes they did (especially value attributes for their select boxes). For the "title", "year of birth", and "country" dropdown boxes, I just used the choice I was going to choose. After I was done with that, I filled it out the same as I had in their real form, and hit submit. I got a "thanks" message with no errors in it. So I'm hoping they got those got through to them and they'll realize what a horrible afterbirth their site is.

The funny thing is, I don't think they're not meaning for people to use their site either. I mean, it's not easy to get a #1 ranking on search engines, right? But I did a Google search for "Guiness Book of World Records" and after the sponsored "buy the book now" link, this was the first one to come up. (And the second one, also theirs (guinessrecords.com) comes up with a blank screen even in Netscape 6, similar to the Netscape 4 one... so it's even worse!) So, um... shouldn't they maybe have actually tested the code first, actually making sure it all worked, before going live on the web with it?? All this is why I wonder if they have little kids programming their site instead of real adults. At the very least they have the crappiest, least experienced web "deezigners" who ever found a job doing webpages. I mean, even if you don't care about accessibility issues for those with disabilities, poor eyesight, or whatever, this wasn't even accessible to someone with a variety of browsers at her disposable, who is in perfect health and has no accessibility issues. (I'm somewhat near-sighted, but that's what glasses are for!) I wonder if any websites concerning things "not to do" when designing web pages, would be interested in this page...

Yes, my site went down for good on Sunday some time... if anyone even noticed. Basically, the main server it was on was hacked. The hacker was not successful in obtaining any useful information at all, but to make sure to be rid of the Trojan, and get rid of any damages he did manage to cause, the server had to be completely brought down, wiped clean, and have everything reinstalled on it. Some of this had to be done by another company, so they also had to be waited on. They started adding member accounts back on a couple hours or so ago, and mine appears to be back up completely (heck, the backups of member data were so incredibly current that I didn't lose a thing!).

Anyway, that's why no posts and no site for a few days. Everything's up and running now (though there was a single Perl module no longer installed that I needed to run MT, but that was easy enough to fix -- MT provides instructions for making it available to MT even when the server itself doesn't have it). For anyone wondering, yes I have been updating my resolutions daily, and I did put in those entries for Sunday thru Tuesday that I couldn't put in (it's too early yet to add them for today ).

First off, whenever you know something's going to be delivered, make sure you get the delivery company and tracking number ASAP. Second, if you ever notice a bill come that, in spite of still getting to you, suddenly has your address somewhat wrong (like missing the apartment number) don't shrug it off and figure you'll take care of it eventually, since after all, it still got to you.

I had our new contract signed, filled out, and faxed to Verizon's company rep, including our address, etc. (All the required fields...) He called Wednesday afternoon to ask if someone would be home next week. I told him that my husband was starting school Monday, so that while this week would be ok, next week would probably not be. He said they'd overnight it to us then, and I said "great" and we hung up. This was around 4pm or so, but I figured that meant it'd get to us the next day. Well, as of lunch time the next day, it still hadn't come. So, I figured the order hadn't been placed until that morning and wouldn't be in until Friday, and of course J wasn't going to be home as he was leaving that night after karate class to go babysit. I called the rep and left a message asking if a signature was needed, i.e. would I need to be home Friday to receive the package. When it was time to leave, I left a message with my home number saying if I didn't hear from him that evening I'd just assume I needed to be home, and stay home that morning in hopes of going in late to work.

Well, I woke up at 7:15 Friday morning to call my team lead and let him know I would indeed be waiting for the package and coming in late, hopefully by 10:30. about 15 minutes later the rep called and said that yes, I would probably need to be home as a signature was required, and that FedEx did not guarantee overnight packages to be delivered by 10:30am as I'd previously thought. "Well, crap," I thought, that means I might have to take the whole day off. (While that prospect was kind of pleasing, I knew it wouldn't go over incredibly well w/ my boss.) So I asked if he could get me the tracking number so I could at least see if there was an estimate of when it'd be in, or if I could arrange to pick it up instead. He looked a bit, and all he got was an order number. He also had a meeting to attend at 8am, so he said he'd make a phone call and either get back to me before the meeting, or at the latest by 10am. So I went back to sleep for a while.

Time rolled around to 10:30am, with me waking up periodically because I was afraid I'd miss the bang on the door. No call from the rep. So, I went and called Verizon's customer service to try and get the tracking number that way. After a few minutes, and after getting the order number, they found it and read it off. I then plugged it into FedEx.com. It had a bunch of rather vague stuff. The last four entries had two "delivered to address other than recipient"'s, one I don't remember, and an "incorrect address". The main text at the top said it was "delivered to front desk". Between that, and the fact all those last four entries mentioned Earth City, I wasn't sure if it'd been delivered to the apartment office or the front desk at Earth City, or what. So, I called them. The woman said it'd been delivered to the apartment office yesterday (that's when I realized it'd said the 9th instead of the 10th on those entries), and that there was no note because they had no apartment number on the address. ??? So, I got ready as fast as I could, picked up the package, and went to work. All that staying home and waiting for no reason!

On my way to work, it dawned on me how they'd managed to leave off the apartment number. If they'd looked at the actual contract, they would've seen it, but they went off my current information. I'd noticed that a bill I received a couple months before, along with having a new account number, no longer had my apartment number on it. Of course, it still got to me because the postman kenw which was mine, no problem. What had happened, was they converted to a new computer system, and managed to lose the apartment number then. The first thing I did when I got to work was call customer service and have that corrected. Boy was I steamed!!! I have to make up 3 and a half hours of work because of their damn computers. Ugh! Oh well, lessons learned. Any time something's being ordered, I'll ask for the tracking number as soon as it's known, and any time I notice an error in my information I'll correct it immediately, even if it seems trivial.

So, earlier this week I upgraded my cell phone plan to be our cell phone plan. I had been with Verizon Wireless for the past two years, and my contract expired last November or thereabouts, and right before Christmas I heard about a really great plan with them just for employees of their corporate customers (which would include me). It's a much better plan, for about $5 more than what I already had. It's their America's Choice Share plan. We get 400 anytime minutes (plus 100 with the company discount), unlimited nights & weekends, and a much better calling range. Also, we got two free phones: the primary one - mine - gets 1000 mobile-to-mobile minutes (good for calling the secondary phone or any other phone on their network), and the secondary one gets 250 mobile-to-mobile minutes. After all is said and done it should be roughly $50 a month for this.

The problem is the phones. J decided he wanted the Motorola v120e, which has had no problems. In fact, I programmed it the afternoon I picked 'em up from the apartment office (another story... eesh!). For the primary phone, mine, I decided to take the rep's suggestion and try the Audiovox CDM9155-GPX. Since J was in Jeff City babysitting and had the old phone (same phone #) which would have to be deactivated to activate my new one, I waited until he got home last night to call Verizon's customer service to switch it over. The activation of the new phone went fine, but after the roaming programming (*228, then option 2) it said "Rm" - roaming - at the top still. The guy on the phone said that wasn't good, and that I should take it to the nearest store to have them look at it.

So today, we went up to Northwest Plaza, to the Verizon store there. Right away the customer service guy said that the programming hadn't taken, which apparently happens sometimes, but that their computer to do the programming manually was down, so to go to another store, the nearest being in the Clocktower Plaza (just east of my parents).

We went to Waldenbooks & bought a couple books w/ gift cards while we were at the mall (Robert Jordan's latest book "Crossroads of Twilight" was finally out, and I also wanted Stephen King's "From A Buick 8" that came out last month or so). Then we went home, and figured since we were going to my parents' anyway for dinner, we'd leave about an hour early, get gas, and go to the Verizon store there first, with plenty of time to get to my parents. Wrong... the customer service guy there did everything he could, but my phone would not take the programming. So, he switched the phone with a new one of the same model and spent a great deal of time trying to get it to program. He had no problem setting it up as my phone (just like I'd done w/ the previous new one) but again, it wouldn't take the programming. I'd also heard him making some calls, and in the end he said there's a software problem with that particular phone model. After an hour of messing with the stupid thing, he said the only thing was to come back Monday when there was a manager there, so that if a final attempt to program the phone failed, he could authorize me getting a completely different model of phone. So we spent an hour to find out I'm probably going to have to get a completely different phone. Sheesh! I'll probably go with the one Jeremy has, since I was going to try it originally anyway, and from what little I've seen and used of it, it seems like a good one to have. Still...

And wait till you hear about the escapades just receiving these things...!

I was having a conversation with a friend today, and it occurred to me that it's too bad those universal remotes aren't really universal (too many of them won't work with x, y, or z remote, or can only do 3 or 4 of the buttons). I mean, we have a ton of remotes. Granted, some of them aren't used much, but still...

1. J's TV remote (our main TV)
2. my TV remote (rarely used)
3. J's VCR remote (our main VCR)
4. my VCR remote (rarely used)
5. my stereo tuner remote
6. J's 200 disc CD changer remote
7. PS2 DVD remote
8. J's stereo remote (never used)
9. my 5 disc CD changer remote (never used)
10. my *old* boombox-type stereo remote (never used)

That's 10 remotes! And 5 of them are used with some regularity. I mean, wow. If we could put all 5 of the remotes we always use (or at least 4, since I doubt any universal remote could be programmed to take the place of the PS2 remote) it'd be great. But even with the ones that claim to be able to, I'm sure it wouldn't be worth the money. Because probably we'd only be able to get it to do 1 remote with full functionality, and maybe another 1 or 2 with partial functionality. So what would be the point?

We ought to see how much a new remote for the TV is though, because the all-important on/off button quit working. The rest work (volume, channels, tuner, numbers, etc.) but not that one button. S'pose it might just need cleaning, but those things are kinda hard to put together once you force them apart...

I found this quiz on this site and thought it'd be interesting to take. I like my results (which wouldn't have anything at all to do with the fact I like the actor behind the character... ).

Who is your Ideal Lord of the Rings (male) Mate?
brought to you by Quizilla

I have a few resolutions I'd like to keep track of, some of which are day-to-day goals, some of which are eventual goals (like losing at least 20 lbs by summer). I've decided that for the daily goals, I'd like to keep track of them on my site so I have a visual of my progress (shameless self-quote to follow):

Warning: include(/resolutions/2003/description.shtml): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/whine/public_html/archives/2003/January/index.php on line 286

Warning: include(/resolutions/2003/description.shtml): failed to open stream: No such file or directory in /home/whine/public_html/archives/2003/January/index.php on line 286

Warning: include(): Failed opening '/resolutions/2003/description.shtml' for inclusion (include_path='.:/opt/cpanel/ea-php74/root/usr/share/pear') in /home/whine/public_html/archives/2003/January/index.php on line 286

To follow along with my progress, click here. It's a completely different layout than this one; it's basically a tweaking of the default templates that come with MovableType, because that was a lot easier. This starts on Monday (the above link still works, since I have everything already set up). The more stars I get, the better, so hopefully this will be better motivation than just wanting to do these things.

Link to a GameSpot article:

Michigan votes for fine on violent video games

The Michigan House of Representatives approves a bill that will penalize retailers for selling certain games to minors.

According to the Macomb Daily, Michigan's House of Representatives recently voted 98 to 2 in favor of a bill that fines retailers for selling mature- or adult-only-rated games to minors. According to the bill, sale or rental of an M- or AO-rated game to anyone under 17 years of age can result in a misdemeanor punishable by a 90-day prison sentence, a $1,000 fine, or both. The bill will move into the Michigan Senate for a vote sometime this year.

By Giancarlo Varanini, GameSpot

Ya know what? I think this is a great idea, and I hope other states follow suit. Just when we were out Christmas shopping, my husband saw a kid barely taller than the counter (and no, this was an actual normal-sized child, not a midget) buy Grand Theft Auto: Vice City. I mean, seriously, is that something a 6 or 8 year old should be playing? Hell no!! Heck, J's brother is 12 and their mom & J both agree fully he shouldn't play it either. (J got it for Christmas, and is definitely not going to let his brother play it.) And this one's not just got a M rating for violence...

This way, if a parent insists on letting their little kid play something like that, they have to buy it themselves, and the kid can't just buy it. After all, there are parents who'd never let their kids buy this stuff, and their kids know it. But there's nothing much stopping the kid from buying it anyway if he has the money, and just playing when his parents aren't home. This can keep that kinda crap from happening.

Not to mention, stores that don't want to sell these things to children, would have extra backing when saying "no" to such a sale. It's not just "this is our policy", but instead it's "we're not allowed to by law." It's a shame it has to come to this, but I'd vote for such a law in my state, or write my congressman to vote for such a law, if it came up. I have no problems against violent videogames, or videogames with sexual innuendos or connotations, but they're not for all ages. I definitely don't want my children to watch "It" or "Single White Female" at a young age ("It" I would allow sooner than "Single White Female" though), but that doesn't mean they aren't cool movies I enjoyed watching.

I finally got around to starting through my funny emails, and I've added a bunch of 'em to my Funny Forwards section, along with adding two new categories. I also modified it to highlight the dates in red of those that I added within 7 days of the last page update. Cool, eh?

Well, I don't have an excuse for no stories yesterday. I sat around and did pretty much nothing. Of course, the storm held off until last night into today. I watched the news this morning, and "officially" as of 7am we had 4.4 inches in St. Louis (they said St. Peters just to the west had 8, and Columbia had 6). That was the more significant "first wave". Later in the day (noon, early afternoonish) we're supposed to get another 1 or 2 inches. Needless to say, it was fun getting up early (after not being able to sleep last night 'cause of all the staying up late and sleeping in) so I had time to clear off my car & get to work. But I guess 3rd time's a charm beause MODoT actually had the roads in semi-decent conditions this time, unlike the past two snow storms that were pure slop. (The first one, the forecast was for a "dusting" and it brought 3 inches, so not totally their fault. The second one on Christmas Eve of all days was predicted more accurately but it arrived about 12 hours late, so they should've had lots of time to prepare.)

Aaaanywayyy... I'm now at work (I actually was a couple minutes early, because I actually left plenty of time to clear off my car for a change) and trying to get back in the swing of things. Even though I didn't want to come in, I think it'll be okay. I'll just crash totally after lunch because of getting about 2 hours of sleep. I actually caught up on most of the online comics I read a few days ago, so I didn't have as much to catch up on today (it's usually my weekday morning ritual). Heck, it's not even 9am yet and I'm already caught up on them all and writing this. Well, I'm rambling, and anything else to say I'll say in a separate post to keep things more coherent. Adieu!