With a half a foot of snow down yesterday (and much more on the Cape), we're now settling in for another cold spell. There was no school yesterday, so Michael Francis and Joe went plowing with Mike for the day. Mike said it was great to have their company. There's always some shoveling and the extra help was welcome. Mike told all of his customers that it was his birthday.

We had a nice party in the evening - a pan of lasagna from a local restaurant and a nifty cake from MRM. She got the word from her surgeon yesterday that she no longer has to wear her brace and that she doesn't need to see him again regarding the surgery.

AOL is up and running on Mike and Lynn's computer, much to the joy of Michael Francis and Matt, who have been reunited with instant messaging again. I stopped trying to be clever and just reinstalled the AOL software.

In this cold weather, the air can get very dry, leading to static electricity. After years of working with computers, I'm usually pretty good at grounding myself before touching anyone. Usually isn't often enough, though, when it's your 10-week-old granddaughter. When the spark jumped from my finger to her cheek, she looked more surprised than hurt. She wasn't too keen on having me hold her after that.

A network was once described to me as a system somewhere not doing something you never heard about that keeps you from doing what you want to do. So it's been as I try to figure out why email notification of these journal entries is working sporadically. Some people report that they have received mail on time, as expected, while others receive delayed messages or none at all. I won't go into the gory details here, but the links between the blogging site, the email server that handles the notification list, the server that actually sends the mail to me, and the site where I read the mail all have their own, um, challenges. This morning everyone's behaving like they have stones in their shoes.

I didn't quite meet my deadline yesterday afternoon. I was supposed to have something included in the next software build, but I couldn't get my files in through the usual channels. If I'm lucky, one of the engineers was able to check in the files for me. If not, I'll have to spend a part of this morning groveling to get permission to check in the stuff late. I told my boss that I'd have some other pieces completed by tomorrow afternoon. When people come to my office, looking for help on interesting problems, I have to say no or, at least, not now.

As a newspaper reporter, it was no problem to write under pressure. That was the job. I most admired the wire service reporters, whose deadline was always now. They would write their stories on a long, skinny notepads and dictate them while standing a pay phone. The pressures are the same now, perhaps even worse, while the technology changes. Now they have laptops, cell phones, and PDAs. Journalism, as it's often been said, is the first draft of history.