Planned obsolesence is a pain. A relatively inconsequential rubber button my phone popped off, and the sprint store can’t repair it. Their solution: ship me a new phone. Over a thirty- cent part! sigh

Since I got home from work at 5:40, I have been steadily working on my technical manual, with short breaks for dinner and bathtub + short stories. About 15 minutes ago, the power blinked out, and I lost the last hour or so worth of my work. Word’s autorecover didn’t help… well, not much. I guess I did keep the stuff from before that last hour. I am so angry / disappointed right now.

Yikes. I tend to sign my business correspondence with “Best,” because, well, I generally do wish the best for my clients and co-workers. But apparently, some of them are thinking that’s a brush-off!

Dear reader, know that if I e-mail you and sign the e-mail “Best,” I still love you. If I sign it “Sincerely,” I’m keeping my distance but you can trust the contents of the e-mail. If I don’t like you, you’ll see a signature like “I hope you die.” Or perhaps “Until the next time I hear from you.”

I’m with Jennings. The lolcatz are the greatest thing that has ever happened to teh Intarweb.

Long overdue: I just purchased a sound card. My music sounds much better than it did before this purchase. I don’t hear the rattling of the CPU’s fan making digital noise in the speakers. I am making good use of this new purchase by listening to Natasha Bedingfield. *sigh*

I would be willing to bet that any nutritional value in the green beans I am eating has been offset by the fact that I made them with butter and soy. I do love soy sauce.

*today’s microfic archived to offline environs*

I accidentally overbid on an iPod on eBay, and won it. It was still cheap, just more than I should have spent. It was a 30GB black 5th gen. When the box came, it said 30GB on the outside, but the iPod itself is a 60GB. Not such an overbid now.

Well, after several months of suffering through the stutters and the syetm freezes associated with iTunes 7, I finally ditched three months of user data and ratings, and went back to iTunes 6. Sigh. That’s several times that I’ve had that happen. I’m hoping that’s the end of the nightmare that was iTunes 7. I’ve seen several blogs calling for an “iTunes Lite”– something that would take advantage of all the neat stuff you can get in the iTunes store, but not all of the bloated features. Gapless playback might be nice, CoverFlow is not anything I want my memory wasted on.

Wrestling last night. We went to dim sum this morning, I got a haircut, and I did a little research. All of this was a means of delaying the real work; some days, some weekends, you need a little procrastination. When I finally started, I had a great deal of fun looking at student poems. I’ve begun re-thinking which assignments I’ll give to my students. I’m now a little in awe that I didn’t assign sonnets last semester. I’m close to giving up the sestina, villanelle, or pantoum assignment; my apprehension comes from the fact that one of the best poems submitted last semester was a sestina that came in for that assignment. And sestinas are hard little buggers.

I am reading a friend’s book, and I feel like I am being taken to school all over again. Holy cow.

In an attempt to get some higher-bitrate rips of my Beatles catalog into iTunes, but fool the program into thinking that the files weren’t new, just updated versions of tracks already in its database, I managed to delete the 45MB file that contained all of my ratings and play count information. Well, not delete it– that would be recoverable. Rather, I managed to overwrite the file. I consider this the same thing as entering a fugue state and erasing all annotations from the margins of my books. Well, I would, if I wrote in my books, but it drives me batty to write in books even though I know it would be a good thing for me to do. Of all of the lame OCD traits to end up with, I get one that could one day significantly hinder my progress as a poet.

–David Ignatow

So much for blogging that much more with Performancing.  I haven’t opened this blog in days.  Hrm.

I took a couple other tips from Lifehacker about sorting e-mail and what not.

• Filter incoming messages by cc:– if it ain’t to me, I don’t need to know about it as urgently.
• Filter all listservs out.
• Filter out “public-face” e-mails.

I fucking hate being covered in poison ivy.  The calamine shit that I spread all over myself does not make for clean clothes.  I swear to God, you don’t realize how much your arms brush up against things until you cover them in orangy-pink goop.

Horrible news!  Where the hell am I going to eat lunch when I don’t know what I want to eat?  This is no fun.  No fun at all.

I fucking hate being sick.  I could not sleep last night.

Looks like my fishing trip is canceled.  Thompson has an out-of-town guest coming. 

Performancing is a super-awesome Firefox plugin.  So is Sage.  I am happier when I have great tools.  I’ve been reading Lifehacker and I want to be better about managing information, time, resources.  I have been feeling very weighed down recently, feeling like I am a victim of persistent partial attention.  I’ve found myself opening an application and then not knowing why I opened it when it’s finally opened.  This is happening a lot more.  Reading Tony Hoagland’s book yesterday was so nice because I think it was the first time in a while that I was able to concentrate on one thing, just one thing.

I’m hoping that using Performancing will help me to log some of those little thoughts a bit more effectively.  I sometimes think about blogging and fail to do so because I only want to get down one or two thoughts, and then I think that it’s not worth an entry. 

I think I may have just spent the last half hour with The First Wives Club playing in the background.  Christ.