This morning I got a second admonitory email about how I am filling out my timecards improperly. First I was admonished for not filling them out in 15 minute blocks (I was filling out the literal minutes instead — but why does it matter? I do the math for them on my timesheet too), and now I am admonished for regularly not taking lunch breaks!

Well, I suppose it is a good thing, after all. It’s nice that they have rules (if a rule can ever be nice) forcing people to take 30 minutes break for every 5 hours worked.

I’m having a hard time concentrating today. I was considering taking another day of not eating anything (I feel very guilty and annoyed about the soup last night) but friends are coming for dinner.

Zaubi gave me an inside-out ball last night and I have brought it to work. I can’t stop playing with it. It’s very distracting. It feels rather disgusting but makes the most tortured squeaking sounds if you squash it in just the right way. And it looks exactly like a blowfish.

We’ve moved two floors down and I am now sharing an office instead of a cubicle. It’s fine, although I miss windows (it’s an inner office). But it does mean we can play music, so I have my trusty iPod plugged in and am playing Fischerspooner, which reminds me of Harvard and hyperfl0w…

It’s Thursday. That’s a good thing.

The phone behind me (not my phone) has just rung approximately 42 times. Don’t people have anything better to do?

I have gotten very sick of my hosting provider for kirilisa.com. They are very slow, constantly have weird little issues like databases being suddenly inaccessible, don’t bother keeping up with the latest versions of thing, have an annoyingly unwieldy control panel that doesn’t (among other things) let you view your billing info/payment info through it, etc. etc.

Therefore, yesterday I switched to another hosting provider, updated my DNS, and wrote to ask my current one to cancel my account. Here is the email I get back:

Hello,
I looked into your account. I wanted to let you know that your domain name is great. You have chosen wisely. Why dont you use your google credits and get some really great results. Also, we do have web design at wholesale costs. You can really do some great things with your site and make the big money. I see sites like your everyday that just need a little more attention and when people take advantage of our services they’re making great money in no time. I would like to credit your account for a month of free service to allow you some time to make some changes. Let me know what you think.

Thanks,
Hollyann

WTF?????? This is EXACTLY the type of thing that makes me want to leave their service even more urgently. BAH.

Fitz is a pervert.

Zaubi discovered this morning that Fitz had dragged a pair of my underwear out of the dirty laundry basket into his crate and was snuggling up with it.

Disgusting creature.

Bizarrely, I appear to have sprained my shoulder while getting dressed after biking into work this morning. When I was in the shower, I was fine, but as soon as I tried to put on my pants I became aware of this intense pointy ache in my back under my left shoulderblade which stabs viciously every time I move or breathe. It’s making life a little unpleasant, right now. Is this my old age creeping up on me? If I can’t get dressed without spraining something, well, that can’t be good.

This morning I am entertaining myself by making an RSS feed for the State Treasury announcements. Making the feed is, of course, easy enough; however, they want the feed to be dynamically generated without having any access to dynamic capabilities (this institution is afraid of a server with any remotely dynamic capabilities – it was apparently a big concession for them even to allow SSH includes) other than Javascript which (aside from the IE ActiveX object) has no capabilities of writing files. Unless there is something I don’t know.

It’s been suggested I use some Dreamweaver paid add-on but, not only can I not make the trial version work, I suspect it will only function if you always use Dreamweaver to update your file, and besides, I’m pretty sure its not going to work with the very proprietary way we have the news information stored and the very specific way with which news items have to be linked to be accessed…

Blah. I’m starving. Maybe I’ll go get some eats.

Last week was just ridiculous. Zaubi had two papers due for the ICRA 2007 conference on Friday (well, Saturday here, since the deadline was Friday in USA PST) and we were working on them all week. Every single night, plus Saturday morning!! we spent hours and hours on it. But, now they are submitted, for better or for worse, and I guess he will hear sometime in November whether or not they have been accepted, which, if so, would result in (hurray!!) a trip to Rome.

**************
Saturday afternoon I had orchestra rehearsal as we had a concert Saturday night in St. John’s Cathedral in Brisbane… this place really put in my mind just what the difference is between a church and a cathedral! It was so massive it had multiple chapels. Crazy. The ceiling in it looked about 3 miles high. It was actually extremely beautiful.

In any case, the acoustics were sort of terrible but simultaneously kind of cool — there was an intense echo which, while it muddied up the sound, also resulted in some very neat effects, especially for a religious-y sounding piece like Verdi Requiem.

Still, I would rather have played Mozart Requiem.

**************
Anyway, this weekend I actually went clothes shopping. Most people that know me are familiar with just exactly how much I fear and loathe clothes shopping. This time was as ever, typical, and ended with me feeling distinctly depressed and very large, but I did find some nice shirts and good shoes. Australians, surprisingly, make very nice shirts and shoes. You wouldn’t think it from looking at all the simultaneous goth-eighties dress style that is so pervasive, but they do. Much better shoes than I’ve ever been able to find in Boston, that’s for sure.

I also got a skirt (blah!) and the only one pair of pants that would fit remotely properly over my very obnoxiously-shaped and ever-expanding hindquarters.

Well, look at that. It’s time to go home!

While looking through a Javascript forum where I recently posted a question, I ran into a thread I started over a year ago when I was working on the new MDOF forms for Harvard Med and trying to write an auto form-field filler… a bolt of homesickness — jobsickness? — went through me like being clubbed with a hockey stick.

Of late I’ve been happy here again. I think when you move to a new place, at first, you find yourself enthralled with all the differences, charmed by all the things that are new. Later, as you fall into normal life, you find yourself disenchanted, annoyed with the little inconveniences, puzzled by the changes, and you wish for your home. I think I was in that state here since about April. The ungenerosity of the place — all the little fees for things, the willingness of people to be open and helpful only so far as it did not inconvenience them (particularly financially) in any way, the complete lack of organic food (yes, for me that’s a big one)… these things (and many others) all combined together to get me down. I quickly forgot why it was that I came here in the first place, anbd spent time complaining internally about all the things I did not like.

Later, after that second stage is over, I think a person re-aclimatizes and can see much more clearly whether the place he is in is good or bad, desireable or not. I feel myself coming into this stage now. It seems to me that, falling into the day-to-day routine, I forgot why I came here, forgot to keep exploring, forgot to appreciate all the wonderful things that charmed me so much in the first place. It’s so easy for us to adjust to good things and then forget about them! There are so many things I love about this place, even down to the smallest things like the fish & chip shops that wrap your fresh and blisteringly hot eats up naked in a big piece of paper like it is still the 1940s. The SPACIOUSNESS of everywhere, the emptiness of the pristine white beaches, the ready access to reasonably clean toilets, showers and trash receptacles in any place you might end up… so many things are cleaner, brighter, and better-run than they are at home. And, people being few in this great place, a ‘crowd’ barely exists, which to me is a massive benefit.

The biggest thing that bothers me about this place, that is, the lack of access to organic food (and turkey, bah), I can only imagine will change very shortly. Australia, being about 5 years behind the more motivated countries, is starting to jump on that bandwagon even now. It was mainly Whole Foods that changed America’s attitude to organics (at least it seemed that way to me) some 5 or so years ago — perhaps it will be interesting to see Australia develop likewise as the next couple of years goes by.