Monday, March 14, 2005
Breakfast: usual oatmeal. Today at work I spent almost the whole day working on 2 projects: a poster for Chris and the updated for-printing-only PDF files of the graduation info for Joel. I also helped Chris with Outlook and other laptop issues (deciding new components to purchase). Lunch with Joel at You See Sushi. A couple of days ago Joel told me about Glide—some kind of Sunday churchgoing "experience" in San Francisco but he made it sound like a Broadway extravaganza crossed with non-denominational spiritual enlightenment. Dinner at work: leftover tuna and couscous from last night. Kelly's birthday: Brian V and Eric made a delicious 2-layer cake from a box and topped it with homemade frosting and ganache. Kelly raked in the gifts: Hello Kitty waffles with ganache (Brian and Eric), The Cult of Mac in hardcover with custom wrapping paper (which was a Trader Joe's brown paper bag with a hand-die-cut of the Apple logo windowed with a panel of translucent plastic from a Nancy Boy shopping bag that Patrick had brought home) by Leander Kahney (me and Patrick), wooden signs with Kelly and Brian's signatures on them (Kelly's dad), homemade brownies and other baked goods (Kelly's mom), a new Windows computer from Central (Brian), Patron trio (who brought this?), Absinthe and some kind of blue gin (Amy), GROBOTS—some kind of science toy (Jesse). I'm sure there were other gifts, but I cannot remember them now. We watched South Park, Robot Chicken, Family Guy, Simpsons. I watch more TV in one evening at BriKelJess's place than I usually do in a month at home. Home. Tweaked my RSS feed so that it's served as a .xml file rather than a .php one by adding AddType application/x-httpd-php .php .xml and AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .php .xml to a .htaccess file in the rss folder and creating a .xml symlink of the php file and changing my template page so that the link tag points to the xml file rather than the php one. I realize today I never talked about my eBay win from a few weeks ago. It's a CD of Sandra Bernhard's Without You I'm Nothing. Steve Miles first introduced it to me, and he found his for (I believe) $8 in a used record shop around the corner from the building in which he and I used to live in Seattle. I remember it was the same record shop where I left my brand new Structure wool jacket behind the counter because I didn't want to be burdened with it while shopping and the guy behind the counter (who was stoned) dropped ashes on my jacket and never bothered to apologize when I picked it up afterwards. I never shopped there again. Anyhow, this CD is somewhat rare—someone on GEMM lists it for US$50.00—but I got my copy on eBay. The exciting part was that there were only 2 bids—mine and someone else's. I bid $15.05 and the other person bid $15.04. I won by a single penny! The CD turned out to be in excellent condition, so I'm very happy.