Archived news items from October 2003
Since this is old news, some links may be broken.
current news
newer old news from November 2003
Wow, what a long day!
Monday mornings I usually go to the Men's Bible study up at the church, which meets at 6:00 A.M. and which has just recently started reading the superb Wild at Heart, which I highly recommend. However, it appears that I'd left my lights on overnight, so my battery was dead this morning.
I spent over half an hour in the early morning pushing my car (by myself) up a slight incline about 50 yards, and then pushing it back down again trying to get up enough speed to pop the clutch. I was continually unsuccessful and now have great sympathy for Sisyphus, in fact. I finally gave up after nearly forty-five minutes of this and asked the next person that drove by for a jump start (which turned out to be a dental assistant who was running late for work, but helped anyway).
Of course, it being a nice, newish battery it started like a champ after less than a minute of charging, and has worked fine all day. But I've resolved to park on an incline so I can practice popping my clutch for the next few days to get some apparently much-needed practice. And I figure doing it while my battery is working fine will prevent me from having to do any actual pushing if it doesn't work; I can just start it with the starter.
I managed to catch the last ten minutes of the Bible study, anyway, and was still plenty early for school, so it's a good thing it happened on a day I'd left the house by 5:50 rather than on a normal school day because I would have been quite late. (Or, more likely, I would have asked someone for a jump start first thing rather than pushing my 2000+ lb. car around for so long.)
Today was a teacher inservice day, and I spent from 8:30 to nearly 3:00 in continuous meetings (with less than 5 minutes down time during all that). They were all good, useful meetings, but that many meetings just sort of wears on you.
Then I started working on finishing up some code for my jukebox I'd started writing two weekends ago. This piece is a "remote control" that allows me to control the player (play, pause, skip track, etc.) from any web browser. I got it completely finished up, but I also didn't leave the school until just after 10:00 P.M. Which makes for a long day, especially since I only had a couple of granola bars and some doughnuts for breakfast, and basically just a single sandwich for lunch and no dinner.
I just had a couple of slices of homemade pizza (left over from last night) and a Sprite that'd been in my refrigerator for months and months, so I'm feeling a little better now.
On the CD front, my excellent tutoring family gave me a gift certificate to Waterloo Records (a super-cool little independent record store in downtown Austin) as a belated birthday gift, so I went down there Saturday and picked out some things off my wish list:
The latter of those comes exceedingly-highly recommended by one of my good friends, but I'm still deciding. I know that I like it, but I'm not sure if I'll end up loving it yet.
Okay, I've fixed the baby name submission form to only deal with males, so apologies to all you uncles named "Buddy" who worked so hard to vote your favorite female names to the top.
Also, if you want to help Paul pay for diapers for his coming son, and you never got a chance to buy one of his albums back when his band was still together, well, now's your chance.
Just got a call from my brother. They had a sonagram today and it's a boy. So I'll be disabling that portion of the babynames thingy once I get home from school.
September 2003
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