hi. i'm don.

The (what I thought would be a) micro-cold I had last week has now settled into my chest and sinuses for a longer-term visit, so I enjoy Fun Sinus Pressure and Amusing Coughing Fits every hour or so the last few days. I’m so happy!

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Yesterday I dealt with a total of 109 data sets containing 140,000 data points. When I arrived home last night, my eyes were still glazed over from all the spreadsheets and semicolon-delimited text files and macros and EDD checkers on web sites and in poorly written Windows executable files dating to the early 1990s.

So what did I do last night to rest my eyes and avoid data overload?

Balanced my checking, savings, and credit-card accounts!

{S nerd}

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Today is election day, which means it’s the last day we’ll have to listen to all the stupid propaganda on the radio and television. Also the forests of campaign signs will start to disappear over the next few days. On the back-road route I take to work, I stopped counting the campaign signs at 250 when I was about a mile and a half into my commute this morning.

Bad enough all the signage, but I’ve also been buried in campaign mailers this time around. I received one county council candidate’s postcard-style mailer a total of 18 times in the last two weeks. Dave Gossett apparently believes his words are so important, I need to see them at least once a day for most of the month leading up to the election.

Or perhaps he knows those words are empty and believes that only by endless repetition will he achieve a win.

In any case, I haven’t seen a single campaign flyer or postcard from his opponent, Eva Davies. I don’t even know what she looks like and I didn’t see her blurb in the election-information pamphlet either. Of course I wasn’t looking for it, no surprise there.

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We have three four-day weekends in November and December because of the holidays. This is the first year we’ve had two days off for each holiday. If I had known about it far enough in advance, I could have requested three days off and enjoyed nearly two weeks total with the proximity of the Christmas and New Year holiday weekends. As it is, I’ll be staying in Seattle this holiday season. Mom’s visiting for the December holiday week, and we’ll probably make a jaunt up to Victoria, BC, to see Butchart Gardens in all its holiday finery. It was gorgeous enough by itself with the plants and trees and flowers; decked up for the holidays, it must be spectacular.

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Via Bug, I find out that The Wall Street Journal’s online content is available free of charge this week only. Check it out.

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I guess I’d better do some work now. I’ve been bouncing around on the phone and back and forth among some spreadsheets and report formats and this ongoing randomness for an hour, time to concentrate on one thing for a while.