Day 29

It's been almost 5 months since "Day 29" happened on March 28th, how on earth can I still write about it? Because, like all the previous 28 days, I took plenty of voice notes throughout the day, so even though my memories of those events may now be somewhat lacking, I still have a record of what happened.

On Day 29 I slept in. Shocking. That's one thing I love about my job at MA, though: being able to set my own hours. Besides, it's spring break, I think I'm entitled to a little extra sleep in the morning.

This morning was different than all the other mornings that week: my tube of toothpaste finally ran out after being on its last legs for several weeks. Time for a new one, and, according to my voice notes, that was exciting.

On my way into the lab this morning I had a short conversation with one of my former math teachers, who had just returned back from Ethiopia with his family after visiting their adopted child's aunt; he had pictures and stories to share amidst grading tests.

My focus today was on the Upper School section of the new website, and now we're almost done with that section, at least as far as creating the pages (images are another story). After so many delays with this website, it's great to finally be making some real progress. In addition, one of the consultants we're working with sent us his first draft of a flash animation for the new home page, and it looks super awesome; what a pleasant surprise to get to see the calibre of work he'll be doing for us.

Now begins a rant about unwanted surprises. Of course, I opened my day up asking for any surprises, but frankly there are some I'd rather live without, such as the surprises that DreamWeaver likes to throw at me, and for this reason it would not be a complete misnomer to call it NightmareWeaver.

DreamWeaver is a popular web development software put out by Macromedia (now owned by Adobe), and it's what I use when I build websites. One of the nifty features it has (that I use often) is called "apply source formatting", which formats the source code of the page you're working on, mostly just to make it more easily human readable. Well that's all fine and well, unless you un/intentionally make a change to part of the code that DW thinks is supposed to be a non-editable part of the template you're using. If that happens, the apply source formatting command will give you an error, complaining that you've changed something you shouldn't have, and warning that the change will be lost the next time the template is updated. Then it gives you a choice: do you want to keep the change anyway, or revert back the way it was. Here's the kicker: even if you click "yes" to keep the change, it will still revert, which means you just lost all your work since the last time you saved, which is absolultely infuriating. I've conditioned myself to remember to save first before asking it to do any formatting, but sometimes I forget and it's soo aggravating.

Onto happier notes. At the end of the day I was blessed with a chance to talk to Jenna for a little bit before heading home. I've no recollection anymore what we talked about, but I always enjoy my talks with her, since we're the last of what I call the 'old school techies', the last two who remember the Jerde years. I value her friendship very much.

When I got home this evening I had a slight surprise in finding out that I already owned two of the DVDs I bought yesterday at the CompUSA sale. Crumb. Well, maybe I can gift them away to someone (though 5 months later I still haven't done so).

Later in the evening I finally forced myself to sit down to finish signing all the HP1 thank you notes (while watching Joan of Arcadia), with plans to mail them (with premiere invites enclosed) tomorrow.

And lastly, I did my taxes! What's super awesome about that is that TurboTax runs on the Mac this year, which is great! Now, that said, I've had one pet peeve ever since I started having to file taxes (at age 15), and I'm not only referring to watching my refund amount keep going down as I put in more investment numbers. Our government, in it's infinite wisdom, allows you to contribute $3 to election campaign funds for free, meaning it doesn't decrease your refund or increase what you owe, and then they also give you the option to donate to a state wildlife fund, but this time whatever you want to donate comes directly from your refund, or adds to what you owe. This bugs me! So just to spite them I always donate $5 to the wildlife and nothing to the politicians.

Here ends Day 29.