Wendy DeCora.com

Its nearly lunchtime and I’ve been at work since 8am and have accomplished nothing at all related to work.
My computer. Still hosed. I can get on this shared PC but it doesn’t have any of the software that I need to access any of the servers I work on and I don’t have admin rights with the public login to download or install any of it. Speaking of admin rights, apparently the brain donor who was trying to apply the patch last night couldn’t log in as Administrator and blamed me for changing the admin login. Wrong. I have admin rights to my own account, I’ve never logged in as Administrator, let alone known or changed the password. The network cable is still jammed in my machine. Apparently they were trying to wedge it out with a knife last night. Joy. So here I wait. Over 3 hours yesterday down the drain and over 3 hours today. I didn’t even think about grabbing a book or my iPod this morning. Why I trusted that my computer would be fixed when I came in today is really beyond me. Temporary insanity I guess.

We go to lunch in 10 minutes and we’ll probably play cards. Great. Since I already played 6 hands of solitare this morning. If its not fixed after lunch, I’ll be back to catch up on some more of the books I’ve read lately.

A commercial for the local fox news at nine said:

Tonight in weather, we’re looking at six days in a row.

and that was it.
I couldn’t stop laughing.

Six days straight! WOOHOO!! And here I was dreading that 36 hours or so of an alternate universe come Wednesday.

Prison Break is back on FOX this week. I’m really liking this show. Good escapism until 24 returns in January.

It felt like I was in prison this afternoon at work. Our network ended up with some stupid virus that cause all the Windows machines to shut themselves down and restart every few minutes. We ended up having to turn our computers off completely and just wait for tech support to fix it. Of course, no timeframe for this fix was given. Some people figured out that if you unplugged your machine from the network, you could work on local files. Not that I really have any local files since most things I work on are out on our web servers and that requires a connection, but I thought I could backup some things or do something, but no, the ethernet cable on the back of my machine was totally jammed in and I could not get it out. So I gave up and spent nearly two hours really doing nothing at all. I had already cleaned my cube last week. There was nothing left to label or organize. I played some solitare and amazingly won after only the third game. I bounced my red rubber stress ball for awhile. David and I even played catch for a few minutes. It was ridiculously boring. And the fact that we had to just stay there all afternoon with nothing to do was so annoying. Towards the end of the day several of us were standing around discussing tv shows on dvd. The tech support chick showed up at my cube to apply some patch five minutes before my work day ended. When I left, she was under my desk trying to figure out how to get the network cable loose. I hope she didn’t rip my network card out or screw up my machine.

What is the lesson in all of this? While most of the company frittered away an entire afternoon of work, all our web designers and entire publications department kept working away, no problems at all. Why was this?

Because they all use Macs.

I need to catch up with my books.

I consumed the fourth book in the Amelia Peabody series in audiobook form when my mom and I drove to Columbus, OH to see Harry and Branford back in September. I’ve read the first two books in the series and my mom was in the middle of the third, so I skipped ahead to this one, The Deeds of the Disturber. The narrator really made the 18+ hours of the recording enjoyable. For some reason, in this series by Elizabeth Peters I have the hardest time keeping all the secondary characters straight in my head. I never get a clear image as to who half of them are. Which doesn’t help me figure anything out since the murderer is usually one of these characters. I’m not sure why I have this mental block with this series, but I found myself aided by the wonderful narration on the audiobook. The narrator did different voices, or at least inflections, for each character and I was able to get a good image of them in my head and keep them straight. Its almost embarassing to be such an avid reader and not be able to keep characters straight, but oh well.

In this fourth installment, Peabody and Emerson find themselves back in England for the duration of this mystery. As much as I adore Egypt, it was nice to see that, even early in the series, the author acknowledges that the exact same formula won’t work in every book. As usual, I had no idea who done it, but my mom figured it out and we passed the time in the car enjoying a visit with our new literary friends.

But I’m having issues with getting my new design finished and working, which is killing my motivation to post. Nothing is ever simple. I just want my fun rounded corners to work on all the pages, but right now they only work on the homepage and I have to have them working in the archives before I can put the template into gallery and its a whole chain of events that I can’t figure out and is causing me to lose sleep and fall behind in my whole life.

Stupid corners.

Update:
Ok, figured that out. Some conflicting thing with a MT javascript call. Still more layout issues to solve and perfect, but I’m not banging my head against the wall anymore. For the moment.

My next step is to get the archive templates all straightened out. Then I’ll work on doing a theme for my gallery to get it to blend in with this design. Then I’ll import and update my albums and my old posts.

Maybe someday I’ll have time for new content….

Wikipedia has a listing of made-up words with their definitions from The Simpsons.

Discuss. Debate. Enjoy.

Word.

What did you get me?

I only ask because for my birthday, I got all of you, my dear readers, a new blog design.
(Also note, that the URL has changed from http://www.wendydecora.com/blog to top-level http://www.wendydecora.com, so update your bookmarks, links and feeds appropriately. Thanks!)

Admittedly, I didn’t get everything working nearly as much as I had hoped for today, but the basic design is in place. Now I just have to apply it to all the sections and make the whole thing cohesive.

I’m pre-dating this post to my actual birthday on Sunday, but right now its still Saturday evening and I should think about tossing myself together to go over to Frosty’s for Donor’s Chose-Your-Own-Adventure going away party. *fingers crossed for page 86* I would like to link to Frosty or Donor in the previous sentence, but neither of them have websites. Hopefully this will be changing very soon for Donor & Jenniffer. There is talk of a vote tonight to help them pick a domain name. There is one in the running that I really like, but I’ll keep that under wraps until they make their own unveiling. Don’t want to be the person that caused someone else to run out and snap up the clever domain.

Today was a perfect Iowa day in October. Abundently sunny (thank you, weather.com for that assessment) with a great Iowa Hawkeye victory over Indiana in historic/legendary Kinnick Stadium. The leaves are all just turning and the post-game walk to the car was especially lovely. Speaking of football, did anyone else see the second half of the Penn State/Michigan game today?! After a totally boring first half with a score of 0-3 Michigan, the second half, actually the fourth quarter was an instant classic. At one point Penn State scored 15 points in 17 second of game time! Michigan literally won the game in the last second. With :01 on the clock, they threw into the endzone and won 27-25, putting the Hawks into a 3-way tie for first place in the BigTen. Good stuff.

That’s all for now. A lot more to come in the next few days and weeks, both website changes and posts with life updates and thoughts.

Go see ‘Serenity.’

Just go now. I’ll see it again. Just let me know when you want to go.
I’ve seen it twice. In 2 days.

What is ‘Serenity’ you may ask…
This guy sums it up much better than I could.
I’d just ramble on about how I can’t stop thinking about this movie and how its been a good long while since a movie made me think or care about the characters like this one has.