tonight was really busy and i need new shoes.  i am supposed to have black ones, and i don’t, so they lent me some which fit alright but aren’t hearty enough for restaurant work, so my feet get quite tired by the end of the night.

i’m going to buy new shoes but since there are no shops nearby and i’m working most of the time, i can’t do it until monday, when i am going to fort william, the semi-major town about a half-hour’s drive away, which apparently has a whole street full of commerce.

w00t

we’re going to get a ride there with the hotel manager because she has some stuff to do too, and do you know how we’re going to get back?

we’re going to ride the school bus.

apparently you can just hop on.

is that cool or what? :)

ow.

i recently adopted a new algorithm for creating passwords, and though it is not without problems, i like it quite well.

now, however, i run into this problem when i go visit sites that i haven’t logged in to for a while, because i don’t know whether i used the new approach when i created the password there or not, so i have to do some guesswork.

this often leads to frustration and failure, because i changed to the new strategy for a reason, so if i Didn’t use it, there is very little chance that i will succeed in remembering a password if i didn’t really care about the site that much to begin with, because my old strategy used to be, basically: if it’s important, use a stock password that you trust, otherwise free associate with the page name and use the first thing that comes to mind that is relatively obscure.

so today, i decide to go to the adobe website and download the trial version of flash because i need it for prototyping our project here at convivio, and i didn’t manage to get the mac version before i left home (grumble).

so i go to the site and they prompt me for a login. i go “oh yeah, i think i have a login from when i did the same thing with photoshop once upon a time, but i don’t remember it.” so i put in my email address, and sure enough, they send me my login.

i try the password as it would be in the new system. no dice. i don’t feel like blindly guessing, so i just click on “i forgot my password.” they give me a handy prompt, of my own design, which is “not adobe, but…”

i think for a second that i might have been telling myself that it had something to do with macromedia, before the merger, but that didn’t really make sense because i thought i had signed up because of photoshop, so i keep thinking.

then i have a little glimmer of memory.

i try my guess.

the doors open successfully before me.

i chuckle aloud at myself, both for the original association and because the prompt worked on the first try, which says something about my brain.

the answer was: stucco.

but i’ve gone and changed it now, so don’t get any ideas. ;)

apparently, korea has a mobile phone on the market with a built in breathalizer.  handy in itself, but now there is also going to be a phone that tests you automatically, and you can have it lock out certain numbers if your BAC is too high.

i thought that i should pass this on to tiffanie, who has joked that her phone should keep her from making calls at all in the wee hours of the morning.   this seems a bit more targeted, eh?

;)

so here ya go, tif.  what do you think?

man, that title looks kind of inflammatory to the average eye, eh?

anyway, i’m just here to say that i updated my masthead again (just in time to leave for a new place!), and that i did so with the help of gimpshop, which is a hack of the gimp, which is an open source image manipulation program, which means that i didn’t have to steal from adobe or sell my car in order to do things like play with gradients and drop shadows.

that’s a nice feeling.

at the movie theater we went to today, the signs only displayed the first 10 characters of each title, in order to conserve space.

as a result, one of the movies was listed, both at the box office and on the little screen outside the appropriate theater, as “monster ho”

i think this might be a situation where a bit of feature customization would come in handy.
:)

in the meantime, however, i enjoyed the situation quite thoroughly.

i made it all the way from harlem to dc without paying a single toll.

sweet.

the extra gas that it took to compensate for the wrong turns and confusing signs doesn’t count.  :)

i am worried about getting my packing done.

sigh.

three times this week i have had an experience of the following shape:
do something that i always do out of a hope for the discovery of greatness,
expect disappointment because the past has taught me that the odds of greatness in the situation in question are incredibly slim and the hope is continued only for sport,
feel surprised as i am proven wrong.

the first experience involved frozen lemonade at bonnaroo.
whenever i enter a festival environment, and see frozen lemonade, my crave brain decides that it is the pinnacle of all that is right and good in the world and i should get some, price be damned. this is a strange thing to believe so passionately, because i have trusted it time and again, only to find myself holding a teeny-tiny cup of lemon syrup, or lemon water, or ice chunks with vague hints of lemon flavoring.
and yet the craving returns anew every time, undaunted.
i told myself all of this as discussion of frozen lemonade began on friday afternoon, as we were walking in the roasting heat after listening to ben folds. i warned myself silently, but i did not listen. i charged ahead with my $5 in hand, and… the lemonade was awesome. it became a staple of the weekend. we got it at least three more times.

then yesterday, sitting in our hotel room eating a dinner composed of the various snack items that everyone had contributed to our (sizable) stash of hotel room food here in st. louis, i decided to eat some spreadable cheese and crackers.
as i explained to kelly at the time, i always Try spreadable cheese, because i like cheese, and i like spreading things, but i usually give up on it very quickly because it is never as good as it should be.
this time, however, it was pretty much perfect, and i consumed it happily, despite the fact that the pink swirlies in it (from port?) made my crackers look like they were being covered in playdoh.

finally, i have no choice but to offer a plug for lather, which is the soap that is provided by our fancy schmancy hotel.
i have a love-hate relationship with the provision of toiletries by hotels, because it always seems really nice of them, but then when i use them i always feel like they don’t really work at all, and i feel like i’m walking around with a layer of film on my skin or hair, albeit perhaps a layer of film that smells like lavender or huckleberry.
the only exception to this, prior to this hotel experience, was the hand soap at the colonial inn in concord, MA.
it smells like cinnamon and made me happy.
the lather soap smells like several things, but it all works like beautiful music, so if you want some chic, expensive, all-natural yuppie soap, you should get yourself some of that there goodness.

today’s the deadline for submitting a title for our capstone presentations (which take place this friday, for those of you graced to live in a world where that is not imminently obvious) so that they can send out a list of what’s what for the folks who might decide to drop by.

titles for academic presentations often tend to follow the following format:

Clever/Silly Modification of Well Known Saying or Metaphor: jargony description of work that implies some loose connection to aforementioned metaphor but really just uses too many words and sounds a bit self-important

so after some late-night/early-morning brainstorming with erik, and a chance to sleep on it today, i submitted the following just now, a half-hour before the deadline (so that’s that):

Thinking Outside the Inbox: Strategies for unlocking the potential of tagging in the email environment

safe enough
fitting enough
pithy enough
meh

it just barely beat out:

The Persistent Geranium: Strategies for unlocking the potential of tagging in the email environment

because i don’t have Quite enough chutzpah to be that cool, largely because i think that it would have made yvonne shake her head all the way back to bristol, and i’ve already given her enough to shake her head about

but, all that aside, let the record show that the true title, on the record of my heart, will always be:

Ready or Not, Here I Come!: Strategies for tagging in email hide and seek

because the second part cracks me up, and the first is so, so truuuue…
:)

ok, back to work.
three more days to olly olly oxen free!