I stayed late at work yesterday, until nearly 6:30. (I should have read this article earlier.) Sandra was having dinner with friends, so I used the time to work on a tricky little problem. As it turned out, I solved the problem while driving home and was able to verify it while watching the Simpsons. (For those who care about such things, I can now build a FrameMaker document (either a stand-alone file or a book) from a database-driven script. Some of the content is coming from the database itself, merged with existing files.) The solution has some Rube Goldberg qualities, but I've had fun and learned things that will help me waste time in several new ways.

The house is thumping from the cold. We live in a house that was originally built in 1816. (Sandra researched the history of the house for a college paper.) The core of the house is that old, while several rooms have been added over the years. The most recent change was in 1982, when we moved here and had a wing built for the MacGregors. Sandra's parents had owned the house and renovated it completely in the late 70's with new insulation, windows, walls, electrical work, siding, and roof. We moved in to a very new old house, for which we were and are grateful.

Like any old house, this one has noises. The stairs and floors in the older parts of the house creak underfoot. The teenaged boys who used to live here knew the parts of the floors and stairs that didn't creak and so could come home late at night without waking their parents. Wasn't that thoughtful? There are ways to get out and in the upstairs windows, too, but we won't get into that.

There's so much stuff out on the net that you can drown very quickly. When I started browsing the Web in 1993, it was possible to visit every public web site. Now, even enormously fast computers can't keep up. Google's index is roughly 8 billion pages, but that's not even close to the whole web. So, we need some help finding information that's useful and interesting. This has the makings of a promising trend, a way to find weblogs and other resources that focus on particular topics. In this case, here's a page about work.

Oh, by the way, here's an article about procrastination for later reading.

And, don't forget - the 2005 Bloggies are coming.