October 1, 2001

Would you believe this is the *second* appointment to have my wisdom teeth out that I've made, sweated over, and gone to only for them to for some reason not be able to go through with it, in the last month? I'll be trying again next Tuesday. I've long felt I needed a new hobby but dental work was not what I had in mind. [2:47 pm in girl meets web]

"Home Garden Persimmons" from the University of Georgia. Persimmon Recipes from Jeannie and Berry. Persimmons (Kaki) From Seed To Supper at Amazon. [4:15 pm in found links]

October 2, 2001

COALESCE() is my new best friend. [10:59 am in tech/biz]

Rick Scully has a new rant on Bill Maher, freedom of expression, and closed-mindedness masquerading as patriotism that is near and dear to my heart. But that's not why I'm linking him today---I'm linking him because he's been getting the same ICQ message from me over and over and over again for the last five days and I don't know why. Rick's gonna stop talking to me and it's all gonna be AOL/Time Warner's fault. If I link you, Rick, will you still be my friend? ...Rick? [2:08 pm in found links/girl meets web]

A dirty look is the universal language for "you're SO rude." Note to Hispanic cleaning crews everywhere: contrary to the impression surely given by many of the people who occupy the offices you vacuum, you're not invisible. And just occasionally, the little gringa you chat about with your buddies as if she wasn't there will surprise you with what she can hear. [5:53 pm in girl meets web]

National Airport to reopen Thursday. I drove past the airport yesterday on the way to my dentist's appointment, and it was eerie and sad to see a giant American flag hanging from one end of the main building, its defiance and pride silently contradicted by the utter desertion of the terminal and the runways and the sky. I would have missed National forever, if they'd decided to close it, for both its convenience and its gorgeous views of downtown Washington from the air. I'm so very glad it's back. [8:06 pm in found links/political]

Dan has redesigned. Also reports zombie ICQ messages that will not die from over the last few days. (in addition, Dan now rules #html on DAL with an *iron fist*.) [9:08 pm in found links]

October 3, 2001

US Airways, which has a big presence at National Airport (I'll say this once and not again: yes, "Reagan" Airport is the same thing; yes, I'm gonna keep on saying "National"), has posted information to the web detailing how operations at the airport will be changing when it reopens tomorrow morning with a 7 a.m. shuttle to LaGuardia. [11:41 am in found links]

October 4, 2001

Free Metro fares next weekend! Sweeeet. [3:19 pm in found links]

October 5, 2001

"Asked why the U.S. government did not directly make the case against bin Laden to its own citizens, Fleischer suggested reporters were the only ones interested. 'I'm not sure that there's a clamor from the American people,' he said." Ordinarily I would make here a sardonic remark about how politicans seem to have all been born with a congenital defect involving the irreversible positioning of their heads inside their asses, but this is simply too stunningly arrogant to be so easily snarked away. Yes, Ari, we're clamoring. For those American people who are going to die for this war, not to mention the thousands who already have, we deserve to know why---and who. We know what you think about who committed the atrocity of September 11, and it seems a not implausible case, but the sooner you throw us some scrap of evidence against Osama bin Laden and Al-Qaida, some fact from which to draw strength and resolve against the storm of wild speculation and paranoid fear, the sooner the country can come to terms with what has happened, and what must happen next. "Because I said so" is for parents of recalcitrant toddlers---not for the leaders of a great, but wounded, nation. [6:41 pm in found links/political]

October 8, 2001

The Post carries a graphic illustrating the packaging of HDRs---that's Humanitarian Daily Rations. I am trying not to be morbidly amused by the cheerily propagandistic feeling of the stylized stars-and-stripes adorning the bags of "beans with tomato sauce and potato vinaigrette." Ah well... propaganda or not, I'm glad they're doing it, and I fervently hope that the Taliban are too busy hiding from warplanes to be out there commandeering food from the people who need it. [2:54 pm in found links/political]

October 9, 2001

Hey, look---my old pal Molly, with whom I bonded when we worked together at not one but *two* companies back in the days when it was still possible to be starry-eyed about The Internet, is writing for a group site called alienated.org. (Molly is "Poetgirl.") It's always nice to run into 3D friends on the web... it occurs to me that the proportion of people in my life who didn't first get to know me (or a close facsimile thereof) online seems to get smaller all the time. [9:10 am in found links]

Really, I mean it this time: this afternoon will be the third attempt at getting my damned wisdom teeth out already. I've alerted a friend to the possibility that I may need to be bailed out of jail for going postal on the dentist, if he finds a reason again today to tell me he can't do it. [12:47 pm in girl meets web]

oh. my. god. [3:55 pm in girl meets web]

October 10, 2001

As I told Don yesterday, you don't appreciate little things until they are taken away from you. Yesterday's visit to the "dental shop of horrors" took away several things. One, singing in the car. You can't sing when your face is stuffed full of bloody gauze. Two, smoking. It's both unhealthy and *painful* to do so when you have gaping holes inside your head. Three, talking. Again, the bloody gauze makes it tough: the guy at the grocery store looked at me like I was a circus freak when I attempted to ask where they were hiding the cat food. Four, mints. I'm an addict but sucking makes the gaping holes hurt. Five, kisses. *Speaking* of addiction. And six, solid food. Since yesterday, I've eaten nothing but matzo ball soup, consomme, pudding, mashed potatoes, and yogurt: food that can be consumed without the aid of teeth. I'd really like some meat... I find myself wondering if it's possible to puree bacon in a blender. [12:31 pm in girl meets web]

October 11, 2001

Have been upgraded, food-wise, to grilled cheese sandwiches and scrambled eggs. This means I must be well enough to be back at work. So I'm back at work. But I'd kill for a nap. [11:00 am in girl meets web]

October 12, 2001

ew, gross: the latest development in my ongoing attempt to recover from Tuesday's dental torture is that I keep developing these gigantic blood clots that want to slither down my throat. *god* someone put me out of my misery; this is worse than pain I think. [12:24 pm in girl meets web]

October 13, 2001

What's more dangerous, anthrax or fear thereof? Am I alone in feeling more unnerved than reassured by the emails my company has sent out about new mailroom procedures? Can you possibly count American Media's tabloids as belonging to the U.S. "press corps", and if so, how many other journalistic outlets are due to receive envelopes stuffed with paranoia-inducing dust? Lastly, since I'm a programmer and not a journalist, could someone write a note excusing me from the anthrax circus? [12:18 am in political]

Look ma, no codeine! ---but I still managed to sleep for five hours after getting home from work today (yesterday, technically). I'm going to be up all night. [1:25 am in girl meets web]

October 14, 2001

Last night: drinking, smoking, and contributing to the delinquency of a pelican. This morning: bacon. Bacon! I must be more-or-less all better now. [2:34 pm in girl meets web]

October 15, 2001

According to Jim Romenesko's Media News, Brill's Content is dead. I will miss it terribly... Their web presence, on the other hand, will hardly be mourned by anyone: did I mention that Inside.com is being sold for scrap? A bad week for the Brill empire, given the recent untimely demise of Contentville as well. [12:08 pm in tech/biz/dead trees]

Oh boy! eToys is back. K B Toys bought some of the original eToys' assets back when that company imploded, so the new site and owners have nothing to do with the ToyWar debacle of late 1999... still, you know, I couldn't refrain from sneering just a little when I found that the site came back online last week. [5:27 pm in tech/biz]

October 16, 2001

Every time I turn on the TV, I become afraid: The new ads for Microsoft's Windows XP, featuring Madonna's "Ray of Light" are, well, scary. I've never been one to cry "sellout" and I won't start now, but... that's just really, really wrong. [9:58 pm in girl meets web]

October 18, 2001

One of my favorite Metafilterians is a Chicagoan who goes by "thirteen". He has this group blog with a couple of other people, that I used to cruise by sometimes when I could remember where it was---some long-ass address with like a fourth-level domain *and* a tilde. However, I may become a more frequent visitor now that I see they registered 13labs.com a while back. Much easier on my brain, as I am the girl who still has to think long and hard to remember her own phone number. [11:22 am in found links]

October 19, 2001

Joe: "Oh drat, I dropped my cookie." Me: "You'll just have to log into your lunch again. ...I'm such a geek, someone put me out of my misery." Eric: "Reboot your sense of humor, or something." [3:18 pm in girl meets web]

It is Scott's birthday, thus ending the month and a half out of the year that I get to feel superior for being a whole year older than him. Assuming, of course, a "whole year" is defined Price-Is-Right style, where rounding is just fine as long as you do it down. [5:22 pm in girl meets web]

October 22, 2001

Useful to me, probably deadly-dull to you: Full-text Querying SQL Server Data. [9:24 pm in tech/biz]

while I'm at it: if anyone out there can tell me if it's going to make my life miserable to enable full-text indexing on a replicated database cluster, please clue me in before I go into the office tomorrow and start breaking stuff. I am not a database admin, but I play one on the Internet. [10:36 pm in tech/biz]

October 25, 2001

Slate has launched a new redesign today and it's been fun to watch. The design itself is okay I guess, but the real enjoyment comes in surfing through the site and watching stuff break. I ought not to indulge in such schadenfreude, particularly when I've been through so many successful and not-so-successful site launches myself---but really, all the application errors and missing pages I'm seeing at Slate today just confirms my theory that a complete lack of understanding of the importance of pre-release testing of anything is prevalent throughout the entire Microsoft empire. XP, anyone? [1:58 pm in tech/biz/found links]

Happy Halloween: Abracadaver's Guide to Goth/Glam/New Wave/Mansonite and Otherwise Unusual Makeup. [11:05 pm in found links]

October 28, 2001

The check I wrote a week ago to pay off my car has cleared. Thus, after five years, Alfredo is mine mine mine all mine. It's official: I'm a grown-up now. Go me! [3:48 pm in girl meets web]

October 30, 2001

I got a copy of the Post to read this morning over my bacon-not-sausage biscuit-not-mcmuffin and saw that Studs Terkel is giving a reading at Politics and Prose tonight at seven. I have never actually read any of his stuff or heard any of his radio shows, but have meant to do so ever since Word's book Gig came out and everyone said it was a modern-day rewrite of Terkel's book Working---he's called an "oral historian" which I think means he's a smart old coot who's talked to many people and gathered many stories. Anyway, Gig was so wonderful that Working and Terkel's other stuff is bound to be---in the same manner of tracing up the tree of influence that got me hooked on Updike after reading Nicholson Baker's obsessive little homage U and I lo all these years ago. [12:37 pm in dead trees]

British police cordon off UPI offices. All fingers crossed for it to be yet another hoax, and one that's over quickly too. When things are cleared and back to normal over there I think I'll see if I can get someone to tell me what a "medical shower" is like. [2:50 pm in political]

October 31, 2001

So the Quest for Persimmons went on for a couple of years or so and then I finally ordered a ten-pound box from that place I found online and they showed up last Friday. Rock on: now only to learn how to make jelly. And then wouldn't you know it, we were at Fresh Fields the other night on one of our cheese-buying expeditions and right there out front was a pile of ripe and pretty persimmons. Bother... couldn't believe it. However, I believe that what Fresh Fields has are the regional native astringent persimmons, and the ones I got are the hard-ripe Orientals. So if the jelly is all wrong after (repeated) attempts with the ones I have, there is a Plan B. Lots of recipes at this page about persimmons as Italian food (?), too. [7:52 pm in girl meets web]

Jam and Jelly Making. This guy has it down to a science, literally. [8:43 pm in found links]

November 1, 2001

A new and scary form of online advertising: I was at dbforums.com, trying very hard to figure out why even one 'noise' word creates an error condition in an FTS search using SQL Server 2000, and dbforums didn't disappoint as far as providing some useful information, but if you go to that page, then move your cursor on top of the window and let it sit still for a few seconds, it pops up an "ad cursor" which is ... less obnoxious than it could be, I guess, but still pretty annoying. What a pain in the ass that the dot-com crash was enough for just about everyone I know to lose at least one job, but not enough to kill the proliferation of ever-more-intrusive online advertising techniques. And don't even get me *started* on lower-right-hand banner-style advertising on TV, in the middle of a show---it didn't work on the web, why on earth would it work on TV? [11:45 am in tech/biz]

November 2, 2001

Can I just say it makes me really pissy to've been unable to see my boyfriend's site from my office for over a week now? That is all. [11:07 am in girl meets web]

Michelle Gains Hurricane Force Over Caribbean. "All interests in South Florida and the Florida Keys should closely monitor the progress of Michelle.'' [1:08 pm in found links]

Cat Fanciers' Association: Caring for Cats. A whole collection of really good articles. Also from CFA, a cat owners' "e-zine", which features an article on the clipping of cat claws, which is fun for the whole family. [6:10 pm in found links]

I forgot to mention that I saw all of four Halloween costumes this year, and two of them were little vinyl devils' "horns" and tails worn by office-working women, along with their industrious knee-length skirts and Easy Spirit sneakers over hose. The one I liked was the Batman mask and cape on a bike courier I shared a cigarette break with around lunchtime. Then there was the costume on the girl at Metro Center subway station. She was wearing kelly-green sequined leggings, and a matching t-shirt that looked as if it were trying to be a tunic. And she had white cardboard spots, the size of saucers to that of dinner plates, outlined in heavy black and attached to all the green. I can only come to the conclusion that this young lady was dressed as the Anthrax Fairy. A bad costume either because I couldn't tell what it was or because it seemed a rather tacky choice, all things considered. [6:51 pm in girl meets web]

November 4, 2001

The Washington Post Magazine this week features a series of five somber essays following the post-9/11 weeks of a handful of metro DC residents: government computer worker, young army recruit, army chaplain, a politician, and a family with four young kids who live in the same part of town I do. It's still odd for me to read other local residents' experiences of the day & the days immediately following. ... as I'm sitting here groping for a pithy wording of a 'life remains surreal' concluding sentiment, a fast plane buzzes a little low somewhere in the sky over my apartment building and I notice that I'm noticing. In spite of the convincing patina of Normal Everyday Life that is warm & friendly like a favored blanket, perceptions remain altered, in small but weighty ways. [3:02 pm in found links/girl meets web]

November 5, 2001

I'm getting used to tingly-face, that feeling that you get when the novocaine starts to take hold, and then again when it starts to wear off. I've been going through it every two weeks for I guess a month and a half now. At the conclusion of today's appointment, the dentist's receptionist said, "We have the Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday before Thanksgiving, which of those works for you?" I said, "Well, I'd really prefer to enjoy thome of my Thankthgiving dinner, how'th the following Tuethday look?" So Thanksgiving is shaping up to be a fabulous holiday this year: I won't spending it undergoing an interstate move, as I did last year and the year before that; and the Bastard Family will be gathering at Don's place for some serious turkey-devouring action; and I'll even get to *eat* some of the goodies. It'd be a shame to make the world's best mashed potatoes for the whole family and then not be able to eat any myself. [5:56 pm in girl meets web]

"Pepco residential customers in the District of Columbia ... are receiving a one-time bill credit of $75.39 on their first bill after October 22... This amount is the equivalent of about six weeks' electric service for the average residential customer..." rock on. That's like six months of electric service for me, at least if all bills looked like this one ($10.99 this month). all thanks to to the PSC and deregulation! or something... whatever. I am a temporarily mollified local taxpayer; Pepco 'n' Mayor Williams are okay by me. [7:48 pm in girl meets web/political]

November 6, 2001

I watched, amazed at the boldness of this little squirrel, and as I looked I saw something else---there is no unweird way to say this---squirrel nipples! ... read full entry [7:31 pm in journal abstracts]

November 12, 2001

Brian has a birthday today. Birthdays all around it seems this fall: was I just not paying attention last year, or are some of you stealing extra invented 'birthdays' according to your favorite seasons, planning them the way people plan spring weddings? Also from the festive-but-anxiety-inducing department: Christmas soon, how did that happen? and oh god, the malls will be packed soon, must make gift list. [6:38 pm in girl meets web]

heh. that didn't take long. [7:01 pm in girl meets web]

Scott points out that someone sent Haughey a river basin recently... i received one too a while back. There must be a speaker of colloquial Italian somewhere who can say what "mando un bacino" means. [7:06 pm in found links]

I have been working entirely too much lately, but still manage to feel I'm not getting enough done, which leads to working more, which leads to... I really really need for Thanksgiving to get here so I can nap for four days, already. [11:24 pm in girl meets web]

Jacob, who is a student of Italian, reports that "mando un bacino" just means "I send a kiss." I think I like "I send a river basin" a lot more, but it's good to know for sure. [11:52 pm in girl meets web]

November 13, 2001

Today a postal carrier held open for me the door of a downtown office building. He was wearing one of those protective white breathing masks that have been all the rage in paranoia-wear for the last little while. Are they wearing those just to make their regular rounds now? How awful for them. Coincidentally, someone was going around at work today passing out the same masks. Now I have one of my very own, so if someone should say to me, "Michelle! There's a huge cloud of anthrax headed straight for us!" I'll be safe. There's a DOD press briefing from 1997 on a then-new program for protection of military personnel against weaponized anthrax, including vaccination. The anthrax vaccine we've been hearing about lately is not an instant get out of jail free card, it seems. Immunity develops only after "18 months, six doses. The first shot, followed by a shot at two weeks, then two weeks after that, so three shots in four weeks; then three more shorts over six months; followed by an annual booster," and it has never been tested on or approved for children. Unless, I guess, there's been something new in the last 4 years. Also, the program they were just talking about launching then was projected to cost $130 million for just under 2.5 million service members and reservists. What would it cost to vaccinate the American public, as a few people have been rumbling about? At fifty-five dollars per, going by the numbers above, it adds up to something like 15.7 billion dollars. The briefing provides loads of other timely factoids, including on stockpile numbers, exactly how anthrax kills, the centralized data storage implications of a military-wide vaccination campaign, and why post-anthrax-apocalypse America will be colonized by servicemen and -women plus sheep veterinarians. A gem near the end: "Enterprising terrorists now pick it up on the web. It's on the worldwide web. Enterprising terrorists have been talking about it for years." [8:04 pm in found links/political]

November 14, 2001

After it was over, or mostly so, I remember agreeing with Don that it seemed like the longest day that had ever been.... read full entry [8:16 pm in political/journal abstracts]

November 17, 2001

I think I first found Syndicate 23 in probably early 1997... followed them from tilde to tilde for a long time and then forgot about them. the site appears to've been inactive for some months now but I never even knew they'd gotten a TLD of their very own. Crazy stuff, I tell you... they were like the first E/N site I ever saw. [5:36 pm in found links]

November 19, 2001

My favorite person on the planet hails from Takoma Park, Maryland, and that person would never forgive me if I didn't go ahead and tell you right now that we were at the Takoma Park Farmers' Market yesterday when we finally found a jar of persimmon jam. I did buy some to use as a point of comparison for my own still-pending attempts at making same, but the experience was most valuable for the opportunity to ask someone who's actually made persimmon jam: "So do you use the hard [non-astringent] ones or the soft [astringent] ones?" The answer was hard ones. Which are what I have. And as soon as I have a weekend which is not pre-scheduled full of drunken carousing and the like, I'm going for it. [3:57 pm in girl meets web]

If I were really smart, I could figure out how to make gdlib play nicely with ColdFusion on Linux. Wishful thinking, that. [7:21 pm in tech/biz]

a happy Google accident: a neat little personal site ('home page'? not 'weblog') of a geekboi in London. i don't think there's a timestamp anywhere on the entire site... that's so punkrock. [7:40 pm in found links]

via rcb and Mefi, Romeo and Juliet for the IM set. 'Fux0r here come Capulet!' heh. [8:31 pm in found links]

November 20, 2001

We're going to attempt to roast a fourteen-pound turkey on Thursday; wish us luck. Momma Bastard points out that the Post recently ran several turkey-roasting recipes, and they also feature an article on how to brine a turkey for maximum tender, juicy carnivorous delight---my co-worker and avowed food-snob Eric swears by brining so maybe it's worth a shot. If all else fails, there's always my can't-go-wrong mustard-breaded turkey breasts. But I hope we manage not to ruin the bird; already I am dreaming about a great yummy steaming plateful of soft dark meat. [12:23 pm in found links/girl meets web]

November 21, 2001

Very cool: I don't have to be smart enough to figure out how to make ColdFusion play nicely with gdlib, because someone else has already got me covered. I heart the Internet. [11:21 am in tech/biz]

Bah: never mind, CFX_GIFGD is Windows-only. But there's CF_IMAGEWORKS which uses ImageMagick and then plain CFM, so that should serve nicely. [11:55 am in tech/biz]

FDA approves birth-control patch. It doesn't sound like something I would like to use myself, but new contraceptive choices in general are always a good thing. [12:30 pm in found links]

November 23, 2001

So now I know that brining a turkey is a Very Good Thing. The bird turned out great; there were six for dinner plus myself and all were most complimentary about the turkey. ("Mad props," said Momma Bastard, and "I never had turkey I could cut with a fork," said Adam. Yay!) Things did get a little hairy when I put my meat thermometer not only straight through the turkey, but straight through the bottom of its disposable roasting pan too: much leaking, much smoke alarm wailing, much opening of windows. All bad. But we dealt with it and in the end, ate like kings (everybody brought stuff, and there was so much food). I'm apparently the Designated Turkey Roaster from now on, so before I do another, I'll buy a non-perforatable roasting pan. Related (in that giving-thanks sort of way): today makes one year that I have been here in D.C., and there is no girl any luckier than me. [11:09 am in girl meets web]

November 25, 2001

There's a new baby elephant at the National Zoo. "Shanthi's pregnancy is only the fourth successful [artificial insemination] of an elephant in the United States and the fifth in the world." [11:27 pm in found links]

November 26, 2001

I swore up and down that I'd spend my Thanksgiving weekend hibernating, and boy, did I ever. Record amounts of both sleeping and teevee watching, plus all-new adventures in learning Perl: I had been so desperately in need of a few days of only minimal human interaction. Feeling much better now, though. [12:20 pm in girl meets web]

November 28, 2001

Steven is one of those people who always, always says everything about ten times more eloquently than I ever could. Also, he's smarter than me, but it'd be pointless to spend time being jealous of that. [2:38 pm in found links/political]

Last night I went shopping for cat supplies: food, litter, and this time, the rare treat of a plastic bag of catnip. When I came home, I gave the kitties some 'nip and then sat back to watch as they rolled around ecstatically and chased after ghosts. Then I made the crucial mistake of not putting the bag away. When I got home from work tonight, I opened the door to find the remains of a plastic baggie, the face of a grinning cartoon cat barely discernible among the shredded pieces. I stepped over it and came into the living room, where I found wall-to-wall catnip. Ground into the carpet. Under the throw rug. On the kitchen linoleum. In the bed. And now I'm thinking I'm going to have to scrape together the money to check my cats in to some pricey rehab facility, because anyone who goes through a stash of an entire baggie in less than 24 hours is obviously an abuser instead of a user. [7:27 pm in girl meets web]

November 29, 2001

I have caught my first case of Creeping Crud for the winter, and hot damn, am I miserable. Even better, I've seen this cold in action at the office, and I can reasonably expect to be feeling much, much worse in a few days' time. Can't wait. [1:16 pm in girl meets web]

Slate carries an essay today by Michael Kinsley about why George Bush's stance on embryo cloning is inconsistent at best and hypocritical at worst. I think that when I first heard the news of the recent first successful laboratory clone of a human embryo, the story (don't remember where) took an angle something along the lines of "First Successful Human Cloning," which certainly makes for an attention-grabbing headline but is, I think, a bit of a misrepresentation. Unfortunately, much of the reaction to this scientific development has taken a similar alarmist tone, effectively conjuring visions of armies of soulless engineered humans. I'm not interested in seeing a Brave New future where normally-conceived and -birthed humans are regarded as inferior to lab-produced and flawless specimens either, but I don't believe that's what's going on here, and I don't believe that these recent revelations are the first step down the slippery slope. The "cloned embryos" under discussion now are four or six cells each, and have not at that stage begun to exhibit even primitive beginnings of a human body, as explained in another Slate article from yesterday detailing the pro-life view on the matter. These four or six cells are not a person, to be sure, and while everyone's debating whether life begins at conception, those same clumps of four or six cells are invaluable weapons in the fight to develop cures for many diseases that modern science considers incurable. I just don't see the amorality that our esteemed president believes is inherent in injecting an egg cell stripped of its DNA with an adult cell nucleus, letting it divide a few times, and potentially going on to save countless lives. You can't help but bring the abortion debate into this one, and as an ardent pro-choicer, I'm inclined to think that anyone who believes that cloned stem cells are moral abominations ought to be perfectly free to decline having their lives saved by science that is a direct result of stem cell research. [8:32 pm in found links/political]

November 30, 2001

Still sick, and had a few moments of terror today when my apartment's package delivery service showed up jabbing the doorbell repeatedly then coming in as if through the door, as meanwhile I lie tangled in blankets on the bed trying to collect my wits and make it out of bed. Which didn't happen, then or for most of the day. But it turned out they were dropping off a couple of sets of cables for my CPU switch, so when I feel ambitious enough I'll see if I can run the Mac and the PC to one monitor. A pleasant enough, low-impact task to make me feel not entirely incapacitated... it'll be therapeutic. [7:53 pm in girl meets web]