It's sort of sensible, since the blanket that I use as a coverlet is showing its age. It looks fine when the bed is made, but its days are numbered. Sooner or later, I'll have to replace it.

But... Is my desire to make a patchwork blanket really workable? Is this a project that I'm not going to follow through on? Or will I just pick some fabrics and pick a pattern, and get it done?

The classes I registered for? One was cancelled, and when I looked for a replacement, I found that there was a conflict with the other class. So I'm registered for classes, but not the ones I started off with.

I'm taking a class in Adobe Illustrator. It's fun, but this weekend was busy with get-togethers and out-of-town visitors and... homework? Where I have to create swatches and symbols and gradients? Eeks!

We'll see what I can get done tonight, I suppose!

And I still haven't ordered the yarn I was talking about ordering a month ago. I have plenty to work on, but wow... more ideas than time at this point.

And whatever else my brain was doing yesterday, that's what it set up.

I got a reply e-mail from the person who had written asking if an item was available. Thanks but no thanks.

I understand fully ($29.95 would have been well beyond my price point as a consumer), and I was willing to accept either outcome.

If I'd priced the item at $5 (as little as $7, with postage), I likely could have made a sale. And I would have been grumbling and grousing and never-againing and mentally and verbally beating myself up the entire time, because after expenses, I would have been lucky to make a dollar an hour.

And I knew that from the start.

So I asked a fair wage. If he accepted, great, I got a reasonable amount of money for my work. If he declined, great, I had plenty of other things to do with that time, which would have been at least as valuable as the money.

Win-win. I like it.

Must do that more often.

I checked a secondary e-mail address for the first time in about two weeks. Had a message from someone, asking if I had something for sale, and if so, how much would it be.

I don't, but I could make one. Not a problem. The price...

Now, realistically, this is craft fair fodder. The sort of thing that my mother would have expected to see priced at $3. (I asked her.) But that wouldn't even cover my expenses, never mind the time it would take.

And... I don't need to make this thing. I don't have a burning desire to do so. I don't need money so desperately that I'm willing to undersell my time.

But it's fascinating how I arrived at a price in a heartbeat. $25. $30 would be closer, but $25 will do. Not a penny less, mind. And they pay shipping.

$29.95 total. Take it or leave it.

I think... I think this bodes well.

I ordered four bottles of laundry detergent a few weeks ago.

Last week, I did laundry and noticed that the measuring lid was cracked. Oh, okay, that's annoying, but not worth getting too bent out of shape about. I'll just work around it.

This week, I noticed that the bar code had been cut out with a razor blade.

At that point... This looks like something that was damaged in the warehouse. At a guess, the barcode was used to document goods damaged in house, or it was returned to the vendor as documentation for goods found to be damaged upon delivery.

I don't think this should have been sold to me.

The laundry cycle is nearly done. I've written to the grocery service. I generally get good results from them. We'll see what happens this time.

Interesting, though, that there are times I don't delay. The easier it is, the more likely I am to handle it immediately.

ETA: Success breeds success, apparently. I got a cell phone in 2003. It's still functional, but the battery is going. If the phone call is more than 2 minutes, it dies. And if it's left on for 8 hours, it dies.

I had hesitated to replace the battery, because it's old, and Verizon doesn't sell them, blablabla. Today, I opened the case, googled a suspicious looking number, and found that I could get a replacement on ebay for about $5.

Well, dang.

So, we'll see. If this works, great, I'll get another few years out of the cell phone. If it doesn't... I may yet succumb to iPhone envy. Either way, I'll have a phone that I can turn on and leave on when I suspect that someone will need to reach me.

I spent a lot of money on stuff that I wanted, I baked awesome maple spice cookies, I encouraged Mama Hedgehog to spend money on stuff that she wanted, I baked banana-and-wheat-germ bread, I ate concord grapes fresh off the vine, and I told some visitors to the Cloisters how tapestries are made.

Good week.

Or a rain jacket.

Registered for classes, though. A class about the architecture of NYC, and a beginning Japanese class.

Gotta keep those synapses firing.

Discovered that my ATM card expired. It expired at the end of July. That says something. Not sure what.

I know I saw a new ATM card a little while ago (around the time a replacement ATM card would have been sent), but I'm not sure where I put it.

This would seem to be a sign that I need to deal with the backlog of filing.

I ordered bras, I renewed memberships to three museums, I ordered ziploc bags (pint size is hard to find), I joined one organization and filled out a form (and wrote out a check) to join another.

I wrote to someone asking about reserving a spot on a bus trip, and wrote to a shoe company asking where I can buy their sandals.

I have not yet ordered yarn or a rainjacket or registered for classes for this fall, but those are on my list.

My credit card is looking totally unfazed by all of this. Little does it know.

I have a week and a day off work, and want to make the most of it.

The week isn't entirely mine, of course. I'll be visiting Mama Hedgehog, and that will wipe out Sunday through Wednesday. But today, tomorrow, and Saturday? Mine.

I'm showered, caffeinated, fed, crossword puzzled, and mostly dressed.

There's nothing screamingly urgent, but there are things that need to be done.

It's been a while since I baked. It's been a while since I filed. It's been a while since... It's been a while since I did a lot, really. Nothing screamingly urgent, but all of these things together produce a vague urgency. A sense that I need to do SOMETHING. That I'm stuck in a rut and I'm never going to get out of it unless I do one of these not-so-urgent things.

Meta-urgency, I suppose.

Well, I'm going to finish getting dressed, wash a few dishes, and then what I can do to appease the sense of overall urgency.

That'll be a good start.

Unpacked, set up, ready to go. I was part of an advance group; the rest of the department will be moved over the weekend. Spent all of today in the new area, but I think I'll need to go to the old area tomorrow and do a few things.

In the meantime, I'm hoping for pretty artwork on the wall across from me.

At my cubicle, I have a three drawer vertical cabinet (think of a two-drawer vertical file cabinet where the space for the top drawer is used for two shallow drawers), and a two drawer lateral cabinet.

The lateral cabinet and the bottom drawer of the vertical cabinet are sized for legal paper. I think the lateral cabinet is about 30" wide. The vertical cabinet is about 27" deep.

My employer is redoing the offices, and there is a better than average chance that in my new cubicle, the three drawer cabinet will be letter sized. (As in, I've seen shiny new cabinets that look like those. They're just waiting to be installed, somewhere.) Not sure about the two-drawer cabinet. I've seen shiny new two-drawer lateral files, but the diagrams for our space hinted at vertical files. And honestly, I'm not sure where 30" lateral files would go. The cubicles are 6' by 6', with countertops 2' deep forming an L. If there's a 30" lateral file, it's going to be awkward to open without moving the chair out of the way.

At any rate, there's almost certainly going to be a loss of storage space. The width difference alone means a 20% reduction for the shallow drawers, and I'm not sure about the front-to-back depth. 27" to... 22"? That would make the drawers 18" deep? In a worst-case scenario for the three-drawer cabinet, I'd be losing about 40% of the space in those drawers.

And in a worst-case scenario (the drawers are letter-sized, but the file folders remain legal-sized, which makes it a VERY small lateral file), I'd be losing about 55% of my deep drawer space.

No wonder The Powers That Be are strongly suggesting scanning stuff to PDF and ditching the paper.

Well, I have my target, at least: to get rid of half the stuff I have. I'll either be left with the perfect amount of stuff for the new space, or I'll have oodles of room for future growth.

I seem to have shifted from paper to electronic, and I just wasn't using the paper version enough to justify having it on my desk.

It's in a desk drawer now. I have access to it if I need it, but I doubt that I will.

I'm keeping my wall calendar, though. There's something about seeing the month laid out, with mini previous-and-next months, that works for me. Besides, I choose wall calendars based on looks. They're mostly florals and landscapes (or floral landscapes!), but this one is Lord of the Rings themed.

Eyecandy. Lots and lots of eyecandy.

And one less item permanently on my desk.

I got the backup to run, and I have it set to update every morning at 7AM. It's taking about 3 minutes to do the incremental backups, which seems about right.

I'm getting some errors, but they seem to be reasonable: in a few instances, I think the software is trying to back up real-and-true Windows files and Windows isn't letting it. And in another instance, it's trying to back up a file that it creates when doing the backup.

If/when I get the enthusiasm to do something about it, I'll see if I can fine-tune the backups. But in the meantime, I'm a lot more sanguine about my ability to recover from a catastrophic computer glitch.

( Progress, I think. )

Oh, and there's nothing like watching a backup to make you wonder why the heck you still have ____ on your computer. Outdated bookmarks are one thing. They're clutter, but they're tiny. On the other hand, I was seeing 200Mb source files for my snippets. I can get rid of those!

I got a recommendation for EMC Retrospect for backups. Cool. Went to their website, poked around, figured that the Professional version was what I wanted, but also figured that I needed to look at it again later to double check.

Went online to double check. Professional version still looks about right. Went to buy it, got to the Iomega store, and... No professional version.

Went to their live chat. Roger was able to see it, and gave me a phone number to call. I called, spoke with him, we got me set up as a customer, and... No Professional version. They seem not to be selling it at this point.

The website was redone literally yesterday. There was a notice that it would be offline from about 10AM to about 3PM MT. If I'd gone in before then, it would have been a different story.

As it is, Roger is looking into things for me. It looks like the Professional version is still on a list of current products, but I can't buy it on my own and Roger can't sell it to me.

We'll see what happens.

...they do what you inspect."

To which I say... Guilty as charged.

I was looking at usage stats for a website when something caught my eye. Someone was hotlinking images. It's a losing battle, but I like to know which images are being hotlinked. And I have no qualms about changing the image contents or name.

So I got the log files, and checked. And found that one of the hotlinked images was one that wasn't in active use because it needed to be redone. But whoever it was had found it anyway.

Gleep!

So I redid the image, slapped a copyright statement on it, and uploaded it.

All because I knew that someone was looking at it.

It failed about 50 minutes in. There's a problem with the existing backup on the backup drive, and my options are to restore from an earlier backup or to do an entirely new backup.

Let's examine those options, shall we?

Restoring from an earlier backup. Um. No. I'm not sure when the last "good" backup was. Might have been last weekend (last time backup ran completely), might have been May 3rd (last time it ran consistently), might have been mid-February (when I was still using my first laptop). At any rate, there's a lot of trial and error and potential for lost files and stuff. I don't like this option.

Entirely new backup. Sounds good. Really. Except that it'll take a bunch of hours to do, and I really should do a directory clearout first, because I have multiply-saved folders. I have a thumb drive, and there are at least three completely identical backup copies of at least one of the directories on my computer. At most, I need one, and honestly? For that directory, I don't even need one.

Which means... I'll be clearing out folders, shifting stuff around, and praying that my computer stays healthy until the next time I can schedule a full backup.

Fun times.

I wonder if there's any way to get a full directory tree....

And I wonder how that would look, knitted into a blanket.

Procrastination play? Um. Yes? But I have written that down onto a rolodex card. If "Directory tree blanket" still makes sense when I look at it later, I may do something about it.

For now... Time to shift the data!

Dell inspiron (from 2007): incremental backups took 15 minutes
Dell Studio (February 2009): incremental backups took 1.5 hours
Dell Studio plus Adobe Creative Suite 4 (May 2009): incremental backups took so long they couldn't finish

I fiddled with the settings, so now it's backing up only images, documents, and e-mail. No video, which is actually annoying considering that that is part of what CS4 works with.

And last evening, I spent... I don't know. 4 hours? About that amount of time tinkering with the directories in my Windows Mail folders. I had 6 Local Folders variations, and nearly 5000 Microsoft Communities folders. Yes, almost all of these were empty, but when all was said and done there were still over a million items taking up over a gig of space.

They're gone now. File backup is scheduled to start in about 5 minutes. Be interesting to see if it goes more quickly now. If it does... Well, there are some other directories I need to clean up, because I know I have multiply-saved items. With any luck, I'll be back to regular backups that actually back things up regularly.

Because as it is... If this computer crashes, I can't be confident that I'll be able to recover anything.

ETA: 1h20m in, and the backup is showing no signs of stopping. In a way, this is good, because I rearranged a lot of folders when I was tinkering with the files, and I suspect that a complete new backup will be needed. But yikes - I don't have the time for this in the morning! I'll try again this evening. Oh, wait. Can't. Perhaps tomorrow evening.

Well, I've succumbed to a Shiny New Toy and created a twitter account. No guarantee that I'll actually update it on anywhere near a regular basis, but I might.

The address is http://twitter.com/AngHed

If you want to see it in your friends list, you can go to http://www.livejournal.com/friends/add.bml?user=anghedtwitter and subscribe to it.

Julie Morgenstern also has a twitter account at http://twitter.com/juliemorganizer , and I've syndicated that at http://www.livejournal.com/friends/add.bml?user=juliemorganizer

Her posts seem to be mostly links to articles that she's written or that mention her. She has a fair number of return tweets, where she's talking to a @username. Those may not make a whole lot of sense if you can't see the original comment that she's replying to.

That's more silence than I intended.

I've been quietly busy. In my last post, I mentioned that I might be teaching a short class. I've decided to do that, and I've written up a rough syllabus. It's been accepted, and now (for my own peace of mind) I want/need to refine the syllabus and make sure I have the props and papers ready.

There's definitely some stuff to think through. It'll be fun, it'll be a challenge. I'm looking forward to it, but yikes, yes, definitely some stuff to think through. On the plus side, I know that I could totally wing this and end up with an acceptable class. And I know that a lot of teaching is winging it. It's gauging reactions, figuring out how the students are absorbing the information, changing styles to help them get it.

However, there's winging it on a micro level and winging it on a macro level. I'll gladly wing it on a micro level. On a macro level, winging it feels like unpreparedness, and I'll be really irritated with myself if I let that happen.

So, long weekend. Macro level preparations.

Also... Cookies! It's been a while since I've baked, and I'm finding that I owe a lot of people cookies for general awesomeness. Besides, I once again am in possession of my Teeny Tiny Cookie Scoop of Doom, and that means ginger snaps.

Hey, doom can be rather tasty, you know?