mamamusings

minor travel miracles

I’m writing this from our hotel room in New Orleans (free WiFi! w00t!), after arriving here on a flight that left Rochester on time at 6:05am. That it left on time is not miraculous, but the fact that we were on it is.

We were the picture of organization last night. We dropped the kids off with their respective friends, packed our bags, printed out our boarding passes from the web site, charged the batteries for all devices (phones, cameras, computers) and set the alarm for 4am. We figured we’d get up, shower, grab some food, park in the satellite lot, and be at the airport by 5am. Good plan, no?

Slightly after 5am this morning, Gerald shook me awake, telling me that the alarm hadn’t gone off. “We’ll never make it!” I shrieked. “Why not?” he responded.

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computer archaeology

A few months ago, we split the boys out of their large, shared bedroom into smaller rooms of their own—that meant consolidating everything from our office/study and our guest bedroom/library into their former room. We took the easy path then, and simply piled everything in the larger room so that we could expedite the boys’ moving process. This week I started tackling the boxes and piles and drawers of stuff that stand between us and a combined office/guest room.

My husband and I are both computer geeks, and have been since before we mett. We’re celebrating our eleventh anniversary this week, and I think we’ve saved every disk, device, and cable that we’ve purchased in those eleven years.

I should have take some pictures as I cleaned yesterday—I’ll try to get some today. There’s an entire dresser drawer full of phones—most corded, a couple of cordless. There’s a file drawer full of telephone cords and accessories. There are bags full of cable adapters—9-to-25-pin, 25-to-50pin, male-to-female, yada yada yada. There are parallel cables, SCSI cables, and serial cables. There are oldstyle AppleTalk network adapters. There’s a staggering array of power adapters and cords. There’s also another entire drawer of AV cables and accessories, which I left for Gerald to sort out.

And disks? You don’t want to know. Cartons of not just 3.5” floppies (400K, 800K, and 1.44MB) but also of ancient 5.25” disks. Zip disks, Jaz disks, old internal hard disks. I got lost in nostalgia for a while, looking at the old floppy disks. Original system disks for my 1984 128K Mac (and MacPaint and MacWrite, as well). Early versions of classic software programs, from games (Zork, Hitchhiker’s Guide, Wizardry) to utilities (Suitcase 1.0, DeBabelizer, and EndNote 2.0). Backup disks from consulting projects I worked on back in the early 1990s. Piles of font disks…I was a fontaholic for a long time. Clip art and stock photos (I’m going to try to recover some of that).

I’ve thrown away bags of clearly broken or unusable stuff, but I’m left with so much more that we need. It kills me to throw away cables that I spent $50 for years ago, or perfectly functional two-line telephones. So I’m going to call around and find out if there’s anyplace that would like these as a donation.

Today I start on the books. Visual Quickstart books on Fireworks 2 and Flash 4, early versions of O’Reilly internet-related books, ASP 3.0 tutorials, and ColdFusion manuals (from back in the Allaire days). Oy.

Thursday morning we leave for a long weekend in New Orleans—we’ll celebrate our eleventh anniversary with dinner at one of my favorite restaurants (Alex Patout’s), and then attend the wedding of friends on Saturday. We’re staying at Grenoble House, which looks quite lovely. Don’t know how much blogging I’ll be doing, but you never know…

starry-eyed

From the AP, a profile of “Joichi Ito, 37, one of the biggest Internet stars to emerge from Japan.”

Congrats, Joi. Nice piece!

what happened to the blogroll?

My husband said to me this morning “Your blogroll’s down.”

Well, actually, I removed it. I’ve been using Bloglines recently (although I may switch to NetNewsWire when 2.0 comes out), and I haven’t been maintaining the blogroll. So I removed the lengthy list of sites, and replaced it with a link to my bloglines subscriptions up in the top left corner of the page.

I know that means I’m no longer giving “Google juice” to the sites I read, so I may reconsider when I redesign. In the meantime, if you want to see what I’m reading, you can follow the Bloglines link.

recovery, skepticism, and my "higher power"

I’m going to try to blog some of my recovery process. I’m doing it for two reasons. One is that there’s value to me in writing it down, and hearing from others about the process. The other is that there’s precious little out there in the way of personal stories of recovery, outside of the meetings themselves.

(I know that I don’t owe this to anyone—I’m doing it because I want to, not because I feel obligated. But Anil’s right that people in a semi-anonymous medium can sometimes turn nasty. I’ll delete comments that I consider to be destructive or meanspirited, and I will close comments on all the recovery entries if that happens regularly.)

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