Thursday, January 19, 2006
Another Damn Potpourri Post
The weather is unseasonably warm for January here in Champaign, Illinois. If I had been ahead on my hours at my day job I'm might have blown off the majority of the workday to indulge in the unexpected niceness outdoors. Instead I slogged through a testing document checking off each arcane item.I had mentioned to Nian that I was having a little trouble focusing on my day job these days. I currently have a big video upgrade project in the works at the Canopy Club that is on my mind a lot. I also find that has the page hit numbers for BNL have been steadily going up (a recent phenomenon), so too am I distracted by trying to think up new interesting things to write about. Then there's the whole -- my Chinese wife Nian is still in china and we are trying to jump through the INS hoops to finally be together -- thing. Still I gave "The Man" his eight hours of sweat and blood (you all know how easy it is to work up a heavy sweat while typing away at a computer terminal) and now I'm in blogging mode.
There is a lot I could do with the REBUSizer gadget I added to the top of my blog and to my toy section in the left sidebar, but so far no one other than myself has used it (*sniff*). In fact a number of possibly interesting projects have occurred to me recently, but I don't know if I should invest the time in pursing them. REBUSizer had a number of improvements planned, but due to lack of apparent visitor interest, those are on the back burner. The BaBeLiZeR does one CNN headline by default each time it is visited in addition to the visitor's phrase. I had been thinking about BaBeLiZiNg all the Headlines once a day, and possibly BaBeLiZiNg the current David Letter Top Ten List as well, but perhaps the front page of the blog is already getting too cluttered a look already if I put them there. A more important project would be something I call Monkey-Typewriter which has the possibility of being a teaching tool as well, so I really need to move that one up on the to-do list. That one has been pending for over six months.
Having been taking some playful jabs at organized Christianity recently in my Slashdot DumbSwede Journal essays, I had planned to balance things up a bit with an essay on the apparent contradictions in Islamic goals and actions. That essay is still unwritten, but with bin Laden mouthing off again just today I can't resist commenting on his offer of a truce. Now in one sense he must have known there was no way the U.S. or more specifically President Bush would take him up on the offer, so it was probably largely offered in an effort to appear reasonable to the rest of the world. But if the President had decided to accept the offer, how would he proceed? Bin Laden and al Qaeda claim to speak for the Nation of Islam, but of course the Nation of Islam has no standing in the United Nations, because, well, because it isn't really a Nation. Whether waging war in Iraq was a good idea or not, one can't help but boggle at the idea of bin Laden offering a truce. You know with God on bin Laden's side you'd think he'd be in a stronger bargaining position. I'm sure bin Laden thinks God is mad at him for not knocking down his divinely allotted quota of tall buildings.Nian's Visa forms still haven't arrived yet. Nian has sent them out to me last Thursday in China (Friday here across the International Date Line) so I can bundle them with my half. So let's call this Day 6 of the NVF Watch (Nian's Visa Forms Watch).
My gym going has been sporadic since Nian went back to China to say the least, especially with the Lung Surgery in December (queue violin music). But the nighttime upgrade project at the Canopy has to wait till Sunday to progress due to some last minute scheduled shows, so I managed to get in a good workout tonight after work. The aerobic portion of my workout was especially heavy, the last mile of which was spent on the highest setting of the stair-machine -- the sweat dripping off of me in heavy rivulets in exactly the way it doesn't at my office desk job. Leaving the gym I could smell my own fresh muskie order. Hopefully I wasn't too offensive in order. I suspect fresh sweat is easier to tolerate than stale sweat that has wicked into one's clothing. Nian has greeted me home fresh from the gym in the past; I don't remember her saying anything one way or the other about whether my smell was repellant. She recent confessed to smell the clothing I left behind in China to help rekindle her memories of our physical closeness. Hopefully when she returns I will establish some kind of routine that makes for regular gym going. Whether she enjoys it when I have a fresh sweat order I will try to get an answer to later tonight.I have complained (more like whined) to Nian about not being able to get all the things done I wanted to do these days, to which she reminded me about how I had planned on going to Graduate School early in our relationship. If I can't deal with the little diversions I currently have, she commented, how would I deal with Graduate School as well? Her admonishment wasn't that I shouldn't do it, but rather that I appeared to be on a trajectory to never get it done.
Our company IPO got delayed by 3 months, so I'm sitting on 60K worth of stock and 35K of debt. Even after the IPO and the expected April dividend payment I will still probably be 15K in debt. Add 3 months to that before I can sell any of the stock due to IPO trading holds and that brings us up to July. My current lease is up in August and I had hoped to buy a House for Nian, Aiai our daughter, and myself -- the next step in my becoming a responsible adult, husband, and father. It's going to be a nail biter financially the next six months or so. Still I hope to come out of this smelling like a rose (as opposed to my current sweaty gym going smell). As I mentioned earlier above, I confessed to Nian that I'd been having a little trouble focusing at work. Since she will have to give up her University position to join me here in America this all has her very nervous about our financial future.Well this has been a long enough and certainly rambling enough post for tonight. Tomorrow maybe I'll be able to come up with one solid firm coherent topic.
