Back home and bad news

I'm sitting here in the San Diego airport catching up on various blogs and news and waiting for a flight back home. I'm heading back for a few days out of my month-long trip to take care of personal business. I'll also have the chance to see my girlfriend, my family, and her family. We just had some bad news the other day, when we heard that doctors think her mother may have a serious, debilitating disease. These past couple of days have been pretty rough and I'll be glad to get a few days out of Cali.

Update: Thu May 6 17:32:37 CDT 2004

Just touched down in Houston. If you've never been to the Bush International Airport, consider yourself lucky. It can be crowded and it is very dirty, especially the bathrooms. One more flight to go and this day will be over.

Weekend wrap up.

In case anyone is wondering what I've been up to, I'm winding down my weekend here in San Diego, sitting around the pool, drinking locally brewd beer. An Arrogant Bastard Ale to be precise. I went record shopping in Hollywood yesterday as a road trip. It took a solid 2 hours to get to LA from here, but it was worth the gas. I wandered around the area for a while and made it to Amoeba Music; I meant to go to Fat Beats too, but it was too late. I picked up a bunch of used albums at Amoeba, ate some Baja tacos, and walked around for quite a while. Hollywood is pretty interesting—it's the only place I've been besides Vegas where you can get flying trapeze lessons for beginners and see a child molester's walkway star.

I spent today by the pool reading about Microsoft's XFS standard, which is an extention for financial services to their Windows Open Services Architecture. Anything with the words Windows and open in the same acronym makes me laugh. Pretty boring stuff.

More from San Diego

It's been a very busy couple of days, but I'm having a good enough time in San Diego. There's something to be said for a place where I can go right across the street from my hotel and eat Vietnamese, Japanese, or Denny's. I wasn't able to get out much tonight, but I can't complain much.

New Laptop Ordered

I just ordered my new laptop through my employer today. w00t! I finally settled on an IBM Thinkpad G40 instead of the Thinkpad R40 SMB I had been thinking about. The new rig should ship sometime tomorrow.

I have to give it up to my employer here, this is a pretty sweet program. It amounts to a 2 year, 0% interest loan for computer hardware. If my employment ends, it all comes up due (deducted out of the final paycheck).

Happenings at LAB-Y

There haven't been many updates here at LAB-Y for a while. My life has been sucked down the black-hole of panic mode at work. It has gone from bad, all of the way through worse (without a bathroom break), to positively apeshit in just a month or two.

Gimme some Metadata, Damnit

I had been working on getting RSS integrated into LAB-Y code but thanks to my job, it has slowed down quite a bit. I'm going for the path of least resistance and work, rather than trying to choose the best version for me based upon any set of features. This is yielding a solution that is shaping up to use Perl and XML::RSS to generate my feed, a crontab script to get other peoples feeds, and a PHP script with XML_RSS to parse those feeds. My feed is probably going to be RSS 1.0, as that's the best version XML::RSS supports currently.

Update: 12/01/2003

Fixed a bad link.

Weekend Report

I'm back from the weekend and what a weekend it was. Even after wrangling with Ford mechanics, I somehow managed to limp home in my car.

Another Fridge

After bitching enough to my apartment manager, he finally got me another fridge. My old fridge froze up too often for me to keep much food in it. When I got home from work for lunch today, I find in its place an old, torn-up unit that barely qualified as an ice-box. But it seems to work, at least for now. So maybe I'll be able to keep milk for more than 5 days.

In Other News

I've decided to start naming headaches like the National Weather Service names Hurricanes. Today's Tropical Cyclone Headache name is Robert. It is moving quickly to batter the coasts of My Sanity.

I'm More British Than Simon?

On a humorous note, I took the Britishness Test and I found I was more British than Simon Willison.