Today was
moving day for the
developers; we were, those of us who had personal stuff on our workstations, to save our files to
Zip disks, where we could reload them on our permanent
boxen (
Zip drives for everyone, team!) in our corporate parent's digs. Someone had set up a portable drive for the afternoon, wonderfully located on the other side of the floor, so that I had to shuttle back and forth from here, to there, to the celebratory
foodal spreads somewhere in between, while my zeroes and ones slooooowly made the trek
from point A to point B. I'd tweaked my
NT desktop and my
XEmacs settings so much, and had too much code,
PDFs, and apps installed (enough to force me to compress it all to fit onto a 100 MB disk) -- I didn't want to start from scratch on a new box.
We were located in Manhattan's financial district, about a block south of the NYSE, a place I hadn't been since childhood, and a dour, rushed contrast to the mix of Village funk (not fully gentrified... yet) and collegiate (NYU) vibe of our new neighborhood. There are few super-tall buildings to block the sunlight, no security checks and bomb-sniffing dogs, as one will sometimes see around the NYSE. The only thing I'll miss is the sudden barrages of free food -- someone would tap me on the shoulder, and point out the fresh arrival of Buffalo wings, or pizzas, or bagels and pastries, and I'd do the "Oh, not again!" thing.
So in the new digs, we have much more light, both of the overhead and the sunlight varieties, and much more space, no longer having to crowd three people into a cubicle that comfortably fits 1.7. Once the rearranging is done, I'll have my own nice-sized cubicle. Maybe. We're using Dell boxes of slightly-newer vintage than we were using, and mine doesn't seem to huff and puff after a few minutes like my temporary one; I managed to log in and play with it for a few minutes, though it hadn't really been set up yet (we were all there before the memo's offically-stated start date of October 9th, and the techs weren't finished). My Zip drive hasn't been installed yet, plus someone had to commandeer a chair for me from one of the other divisions. I noticed that my first name, according to the system, is Jennifer; some sort of mix-up, unless my name is Jennifer. /me checks the driver's license, one more time Everything -- Zip, chair, name, nameplate, etc. -- should be rectified by Monday. Maybe.
Today is the 69th birthday of Willie Mays. Say hey! (No, wait a minute. His birthday is May 6th. However, one of my nephews has a birthday today. Moral: don't node before downing that first cup of coffee.)
I read in the papers that the head of the Southeastern Legal Foundation, the group most famous for tenaciously championing the efforts to have Bubba disbarred, was arrested in a park in Atlanta. According to the New York Times account (buried several pages into the front section of the paper), the man was caught "fondling himself" by an undercover policeman, who himself was "fondled" by the man during the brief discussion that led to the arrest. The police blotter continues to be stranger than fiction.
Did you know? The name of the Bull Moose Party, founded by Theodore Roosevelt when he ran as a third-party candidate for the US presidency in 1912, came from a line that TR often tossed out in his speeches over the years: "I'm hung like a bull moose!" To this day, no one knows why he was so fond of saying that in his speeches.