Fung shui rides again

It's coming up on a year at my job. Over the course of a year I manage to do horrible things to the software configuration on my computer. Installing and uninstalling trial products, there are shards of software all over the place. It was time, past time even, to reformat the hard drive and start anew, which I did yesterday afternoon. While that was going on, I was faced with an office that had its share of creeping clutter. Editing drafts stood in stacks on the corner of the desk. New project files were scattered among personal notes. It was time to clean house.

The biggest problem with cubicles is that they are designed to have you work while facing away from the door. A visit has not choice but to interrupt and, possibly, surprise you. Sandra gave me a little mirror, but people were still managing to sneak up. I have moved my computer monitor so that it's facing the doorway. I'm sitting at a bit of an angle to the desk and my back may be a bit torqued by the time I'm done, but it's worth a try. It's been said that if you're surprised by people's arrival, you'll be surprised by their ideas.

There's a big meeting this morning, announcing details of a reorganization in the group to which I'm assigned. I don't think that the changes will have any major, immediate impact on me. The director who called the meeting said that there would be cake. I was supposed to bring food to my manager's staff meeting, which was trumped by this other, bigger meeting. So now we have two Finnish coffee breads and a can of Spam Lite.

Sandra's cousin, Phyllis, is spending the weekend with us. She's flying from Chicago this morning. Sandra will meet her at the airport and, after errands, go to the camp for the night.

From the My VCR is Flashing 12:00 Dept.
There's a whole economic world of which I'm only dimly aware, that of ringtones. In brief, you can buy (or rent or lease or whatever the right verb is) short clips of music that play when you receive an incoming call. You can have different ringtones for different callers. In addition, you can have what are called ringbacks. In this case, the person calling you will hear a musical clip. I stumbled on to a service that would have let me use Freddy Freeloader from Miles Davis as my ringback tone. I think that these tones cost a dollar or two a piece, but I'm not sure if it's a one-time charge, a subscription fee, or something else. Apparently, enough people have figured this out to make the ringtone business very popular for the wireless phone companies.

New releases of Apple's iTunes and my new friend Replay Radio have made it even easier to record Internet radio shows for later playback. The radio shows were a part of my work day for several years and it's comforting to have them back. I'll wax nostalgic another time about radio, listening to Carl de Suze on WBZ and WBZA in the early morning darkness on school day, hearing Mississippi Harold Wilson play Paul Butterfield's East-West in a late 1960s night.

Michael Francis worked in our yard yesterday, splitting and stacking wood, straighten up some construction equipment of Mike's that we've kept in back. MF is bulking up for football. Earlier this week, he was carrying packages of roofing shingles up ladders and was sore for a couple of days. Football practice starts at the first of August.

In separate calls, I had good conversations with Mike and Adam last night. Our wives were out for the evening, so the guys got on the phone. The conversations meandered nicely on a summer's evening - from work to baseball to the expansion of the Smith College campus and the need for science and engineering program for women to communities and business networking (the meet-and-greet kind, not 800.11g). I brought them up to date on my health. I'd been having a couple of bad days, but, about 1:30 yesterday afternoon, the wet, wool blanket lifted and I was able to do stuff again. I'm really blessed to be supported by such a wonderful family and so many good friends. As I often quote Luis Tiant, they make me do better than I can do.

Adam, Jennie, and Lily spent Tuesday night at the camp. Yesterday morning an engineer from Verizon came to look over the settings. (See, I told you this was going to be a saga.) The engineer told Adam that getting phone service to our camp was going to be a big project. The last phone connection is at pole #22. We're at pole #30. The poles are 150 feet apart, many surrounded by tree cover. Adam said that the engineer estimates that the work will take a couple of weeks. I can't locate my phone-company-to-UTC time conversion table, but I think that two weeks is optimistic.