fine whine

As the end of the year rolls around (as 2005 just did, you may recall) I always seem to have a surplus of vacation days stored up. Our paid time off combines all sick, personal and vacation time into one big chunk from which I would take any one at a time... except that I haven't been sick enough to skip work in many a year, don't know what constitutes a personal day, and don't take enough vacations. So I end up taking days here and there just to use them up, making long weeekends sometimes and other times merely breaking up the weeks.

Occasionally the days I take off come in handy, such as when roof work needs to be done, or someone needs to give our treadmill its yearly checkup (and susbsequent motor replacement). In those cases I have an appointment of sorts (even if it is just a vague "before noon" or worse) but often no idea of what else I should be doing. Especially when the technician/repair person shows up. Should I be doing housework? Sometimes I wash dishes, but few is the work that takes less time than I use washing dishes. Most of the time I'm left with the question of what else to do. Not wanting to bother them, I leave the workers alone, and hide out elsewhere in the house with a book, or play video games.

Sometime I'd like to ask one of them what other people at home do during work visits. Maybe I can get a pointer or two.

Yesterday, however, we weren't having any work done, but I was still left with the sense that I shouldn't be just sitting around. I think I've had too many days off lately, and developed some weird form of cabin fever wherein I'm completely capable of leaving the house but feel like I've got nowhere to go. So I washed a few dishes, vaccuumed one room, and in the end wound up cutting and sewing some curtains for our dining room. I meant to use it as a teaching kind of thing for Jessica* but she was doing other things and I didn't stop to try and get her to work with me. All in all the curtains came out okay, and they needed to be put together and hung, but to be honest, I still felt like I was supposed to be at work and instead was just doing busywork at home. I guess I need to get out more.

* I was lucky enough to have taken Home Economics classes in eighth grade, in which, among other things, I excelled at sewing. Or at least poking needle holes in paper in very straight lines, as most of the class time we didn't have thread or fabric to work with. It was somewhat like algebra or calculus, in that both are 'math' but it takes some time before you can actually use the numbers. Or something like that.

Even since Carina wrote about 43 Things I've wanted to make a list of my own on the site. It offers people a very simple interface for making a 43-item to-do list of sorts*, and easy access to items and lists from other members. It took me some effort and thought, but I too have written my 43 things.

I've even begun working on some of them. This one is rather specific but still one that I want to do. The 43things site lets me add updates and even pictures to show what I've done.

What I'm doing, I should explain, is making the wishlist feature of online DVD retailer DeepDiscountDVD more usable. The way it works on the site is this: you add discs to your wishlist and then email the list to the people you hope will buy them for you. Other wishlists, such as the ones Amazon offers, are pages available online that link back to the site and can be accessed and updated easily without spamming people with more emails.

So the script I've created so far takes the email from DDD (which is sent to a mailbox I've created just for this), scans through the titles and links, and grabs DDD's cover art image links, and links those to the pages to buy the discs. My next steps are to cache links, so that I'm not hitting DDD's servers many times to get the same data, and to create some sort of presentation better than just the cover images.

Then again, it does look neat with just the pictures. Check it out.

* Other 43-item list sites provided by the creators are 43 Placess and 43 People. They are all linked together by userid and equally easy and fun to use.

The lights came back on this morning sometime before the aforementioned 5a.m. target, but I'm not sure when. Jessica woke me up to point out that some of the lights were now on, ones that I'd switched on for this very moment to give us a better indication the power had returned.

I muttered something about it, and she re-set the clocks, the nine volt battery backups having long since given out. I, for my part, attempted to fall back asleep.

Today I'm tired. Tired of waking up early, tired of power outages, and tired that such a vital system has no failover or redundancy* built into it.

* Lest you think I'm misunderstanding the concept of redundancy, last night while I walked around with a lit candle, I also carried a flashlight.

I only tripped and snuffed the candle out once, but in darkness once is more than enough.

I am typing this by candlelight*, since an explosion this morning blew up two transformers at the local substation and knocked the third out of commission. Mine is but one of many thousand houses affected by this blackout, and like the others on my street, is all-electric so I am without heat or a way to cook the food that is quickly spoiling, other than to grill it.

I don't know if Pizza Rolls can be grilled, but I may end up trying that if the power isn't soon restored. AEP claims that the power will be restored by 5a.m. Tuesday, but that was before the torrential downpour began and darkness fell on the thirty or forty-odd trucks worth of repair and emergency workers scrambling to connect a temporary portable transformer and do whatever else needs to be done to get all of us back on line.

I'm 'online' at the moment courtesy of Jessica's aging, but still functional, laptop. Its battery indicators are notoriously wrong, so I have no good way of knowing how much time remains for me to finish complaining.

What bugs me so much isn't that the power goes out so often for so long, but that they have no better system in place to fix things or offer any sort of redundancy. Instead of being a distributed grid or net like, for example, the Internet, the power lines here seem to form more of a tree, with substations for branches, four-house transformers for twigs and individual houses for the leaves.

Last year we learned what happens when one of the smaller transformers gets knocked out, especially on a day when a whole bunch of them go offline. People freeze. If not for kind-hearted friends and their heated house, we'd've gotten frostbite for Christmas and frozen quite readily last year. I doubt the outage will last as long this year, but it seems that the power companies are constantly encountering 'once-in-a-' whatever sort of situations.

Either they're just bad at contingency planning or I'm too picky about being powerless.

It's annoying that I really have few alternatives. We have a decent number of candles ready, and a grill for cooking, and even a flashlight or two, but I'd rather not just get by in this situation. I want my standard of living back.

Do I need a generator? If the battery holds out I think I'll add some to my wishlist for any of you last-minute holiday shoppers.

* Well, I suppose the laptop backlight is giving me some light for typing, but "typing by backlight" just doesn't have the same ring as "candlelight" nor does it convey the ass-backwardness of the situation or my frustration nearly as clearly.

I've never liked the whole 'bedtime' concept. Somehow I never got good at it. Well, at least not the falling asleep part.

For years I've had difficulty getting to sleep at the proper hour. My next-door neighbor* would squeal on me when she saw my bedroom light on across the driveway. I just wasn't tired, I'd say in my defense, but my parents wouldn't hear of it. Later in my formative years I learned to sneak down to the basement and watch TV or use the computer in the relative darkness, and down there I tended to get away with it more often.

To this day I find myself with many a more interesting thing to do than sleep at bedtime. Washing dishes, for example.

Sometimes even when I have given up and bedded down slumber eludes me. I'll lay there, tossing and turning and kneeing my wife, and I just can't fall asleep. Having too many thoughts running through one's head is apparently a fairly common problem, I guess, and I'm no exception. But what then to do with all of those thoughts?

Some of them are interesting enough to write down, or to furiously try to remember to write down the next day (the effort of which only makes falling asleep more difficult) but others are just bothersome, like the invisible monsters of youth but not scary, just annoying. There needs to be a way to make them go away, I say.

So the other night I thought back to something somebody'd suggested, sometime ago. I tried to clear my mind of all thoughts, and to focus instead on the flickering flame of a candle, as the sole light in an otherwise dark room, or my head, or something like that. It's somewhat like one of those "try not to think of an elephant" exercises, and I don't think it ever really worked for me in the past, either.

Stupid elephant. You try not thinking about an elephant, if you aren't already.

But I wasn't thinking about elephants this time, or not thinking about them either. I was, in fact, thinking about a candle's flame, and managed to keep focus on it for at least a second or two. Then I noticed that my imaginary candle was apparently perpendicular to my head.

This sounds odd, but bear in mind that every other time I've tried this, that I can recall, I've been sitting upright. With my head upright, the candle was upright. However, this time I was laying down but the candle wasn't. Is gravity that important to my mind, I wondered, and tried to think of a candle parallel to my resting form, but even then physics overruled my imagination and the flame burned upward. This struck me as very odd, and my repeated attempts to fight gravity with my mental powers failed. No matter what I tried I could not imagine a candle burning sideways.

Must've been because I was so tired.

* My grandma, no less! I think my mom put her up to it. Of course I realize she wasn't trying to be mean or anything, but all I was doing was reading anyway, even if it was well after my bedtime.

I finally did it. I changed my eBay password after seven years, six months and four days.

What was my password for those 392 weeks? 'password'. I know it's a really, really bad password, but had eBay not been annoying me with a page informing me of my bad choice of passwords for these last couple months, I'd probably still have 'password' today, and for who knows how many more weeks.

Seven years ago I had many a password, and I often used variations of the word 'password'. Sometimes I'd substitute numbers for the letters or reverse them, but eBay never instituted mandatory password changes like the university or anywhere else did. If any site ever were to introduce such a simple security method to so many people, it would be eBay*, but the best they do is apparently mere pestering.

But I'm all secure now, I suppose. Oddly enough, in all of those 65,800 hours I never had any problem at all, even with a password that must be in the top five easiest to guess.

Passwords are such silly things anyway. More often than not they are used to provide the illusion of security, not reality. Rarely do I stoop to putting my password on a Post-it note as others I've seen have done, but I've slipped up in other ways, not the least of which was using 'password' as one. I also regularly use the same three or four passwords in different places, and sometimes I use all letters or numbers without any punctuation or changes in case. And you know what? Only once, ever, have I had a problem other than merely forgetting my password.

In that case somebody logged onto an application at work with my username and the default password we all know. It's such a dumb thing anyway, since I need to log onto a computer with the application installed to use that application. Anyway, nothing bad came of it, and I promptly changed my password to something less well-known. I suppose if that is my only slip-up I haven't done too badly.

And now I've got eBay off my case, too.

* I am not aware of what America Online's password changing policies are, or if they even have any. Nor do I know which service can claim more active users.