General

I had my custom desk and cabinets installed in my office today. I haven’t finished moving everything back in place yet, but it looks great. They have to come back tomorrow to add another keyboard tray; there were supposed to be two but they only installed one.

I have 3 computers I use regularly: a 15″ PowerBook, which is my primary development system, a desktop G4 minitower, and a Linux box as my server. The room isn’t big enough for two full sized desks, so I was badly lacking desk space for all of my computers. After shopping around for workspace components I decided to go with a custom built desk from California Closets. The desk occupies two full walls with the cabinets mounted above it on one wall. I have 3 separate work areas, two of which have keyboard trays, with the corner workspace for my PowerBook. It looks and feels like a real office now.

I’m now on the board of my condo association. We had our annual meeting and election tonight. There was a pretty big turnover; only 3 of the current board members were re-elected with 4 new board members.

I just got a very heavy package sent from somewhere close to Vancouver via FedEx marked “Do not open until Christmas”.

I finished the last of my holiday shopping today. This is the first time I’ve ever finished early. Usually I wait until the last weekend and go into a panic trying to find the right gifts. Now I have to wrap the gifts (which I’m really bad at) and write my Christmas cards.

I did a bit of re-gifting with one item. I bought the item intending it for one person, but I then found something better for her, so that gift was then re-shuffled to someone else. I then found something that was even better for that person, so that first gift ended up going to a third person.

Sorry I haven’t been writing much here lately, but a lot has been going on. Some very good and exciting things are happening at work which I can’t talk about right now. There are also some very interesting upcoming developments related to WorldBeatPlanet.

On the home front, I have a few big home improvement projects coming up. In a few weeks I’m having custom furniture installed in my office to give me more usable space. Right now I have too many computers and not enough desks. The system from California Closets will occupy two walls with enough workspace for two laptops and two minitowers. I’m also having my patio enclosed, which will be done in about 2 months, since the windows have to be made to order.

On Nov. 22, 2001, Jerry Colaitis died of a blood-borne infection. It all started with a dinner at Benihana. Jerry ducked to avoid a piece of shrimp tossed at him by the tableside chef, which the chain is famous for. Doing so resulted in a neck injury, for which he underwent surgery 6 months later. Complications from the first surgery required a second procedure two weeks later. Following the second surgery, he developed the infection which killed him.

So who did his family decide to sue? Benihana of course, not the doctor. (via boing boing)

I just got hit with 4 5 6 comment spams from the same asshole, advertising the same 3 products in each one. All comments here must be approved by me before they appear, so the spammers are just wasting their time since none of their spam will get past me without being deleted. I also block their IP address in my .htaccess.

Update: that spammer won’t be bothering me any more. I added a few lines of code to reject his comments before they even get to the approval queue. Tomorrow I’ll expand it to handle other kinds of spam.

I just got hit with 4 comment spams at once. Note that all comments are held for approval before they appear, so all spam will be deleted before it gets posted. Furthermore, I add a DENY for every spammer’s IP address to my .htaccess.