Saturday, March 27, 2004
Brunch with Patrick at Orphan Andy's. Returned an item that didn't work out at Radio Shack. Ran in to Jesse on his way to work, said hello-goodbye. Stopped for tea at Sweet Inspiration. I read from Neal Stephenson's Quicksilver while Patrick did Mandarin studies, translating a letter he received from one of the teachers he'll be meeting on his trip. I sent this message to HP at 1:06 PM Pacific today regarding my desire to recycle an HP ScanJet 5pse: ==begin== Can it be arranged to pick up on a certain day when I'm home? Friday, April 9 will work for me, for example. Or, can I drop it off somewhere close by to me? This process seems very easy except for the pickup part in situations where someone isn't always home. Thanks for providing this service! ==end== but after the form was sent I got an error message: "Request was not sent due to the following error: Connection failed" in addition to ==begin== custom quote request accepted—Your custom quote request has been successfully entered and accepted. Within one week you will be contacted by phone or email to discuss your request in detail or to reply to your question. If you are not contacted within this time, please contact HP by emailing recycling_services-prs@hp.com or by calling 1-888-485-1849. ==end==. Replaced the order I attempted 2 days ago after confirming that my credit card hadn't been charged. Fixed my bookmarks page to no longer use floats because they didn't work well all the time. (IE6 sometimes wouldn't display the floated content depending on the size of the browser window. It's not as though there wasn't enough space—the content simply didn't show up anywhere on the page.) Voted my ballots in the forthcoming Adobe stockholder's meeting. Did computer backups. Napped. Dinner at home by myself while Patrick went to a play with Kenny. Ramen with baby bok choy and age globes, leftover Spanish rice. Did a lot of reading on the Web—mostly Web design stuff. Started with simplebits, then happycog, then read Chapter 3 of Taking Your Talent to the Web by Zeldman, then read digital-web, then saila, then zeldman. Dean Edwards (dean.edwards.name) is doing some very interesting work ("IE7," which I put in quotes coz I don't like his name for it). Read rumors about the future of IE on wininsider. And before all of this, I spent some money at VisiBone where Bob Stein is continuing to do simply blow-me-away wonderful work. His brand new spiral-bound Card Collection is a fantastic deal—I immediately bought one for home and one for work. Read some on pirated-sites, then cameronmoll. Discovered something very amusing when searching Google on "miserable failure." Read about Googlebombing on BBC and searchenginewatch. Read alistapart, evolt.