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Had to get the car registered today (nothing like waiting til the last moment), so I also took the opportunity to get some other errands done.  By the time I came home I had a bunch of clothes that I picked up on sale, cat foods of various flavours and densities (yes, densities), baking ingredients and a new small sketchbook.

I bought a moleskine.  It’s  not too big, and not too small.  It will fit in my purse, or my carry-around-bag, or even my back pocket without being TOO small.  I bought it for writing and sketching and just plain Doing Stuff.

I don’t know where the fear of blank pages came from.  Maybe it’s a childhood of zealous environmentalists telling our generation that wasting paper is bad.  Maybe my Dad made some weird sound when I scribbled all over his good matte board.  I don’t know.  As a result, I always felt weird starting a new project.  I have no problems ripping out multiple inches of knitting, but wasting drawing paper scares the living shit out of me.

So in addition to the moleskine, I also picked up a book that takes a look inside the take-along sketchbooks of various artists.  I’m looking forward to digging into it.  It’s always nice to remember that no artist does perfect work all the time, or sometimes even anything that looks vaguely recognizable.

Finally, a picture.  It’s warmed up considerably outside, but I thought I’d share this.  It was around 7AM outside the workplace on one of the frosty/foggy days we had recently.  Hell, we’ll probably get more, knowing our weather.  It’s been a winter of fog.  I’m wondering whether the Dementors are breeding.

At least, nothing productive on the computer.

I’m not sure if she’s saying “You need to pay more attention to me”, or “your keyboard was dirty.  I cleaned it”, or simply “Make with the food, bitch.”

Go ahead and leave your own caption in the comments.  I dares ya.

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Checking to see if all is well re: collateral pages.

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I’m back!  Well, kinda.  I’d just started getting  back in the habit of posting when my webserver went down.  Even worse?  There was no backup.

Luckily, I had the last page’s worth of posts up on my screen, so I quickly saved the page & was able to re-create the posts last night.  I’m still trying to get all the widgets & plugins working again, but it will happen.

In other news, I’m getting over yet another cold.  First it was the flu in January, and now it’s a sinus cold.  I missed yesterday at work because I couldn’t get enough sleep the night before; wound up gasping for air all night.  Managed to get some more sleep during the day & took Nyquil before bed last night.  Let’s just say that the stuff works like a charm.

Also, trying to get used to Google Buzz.  All of a sudden, there’s a bunch of new stuff in my email.  I’m not sure if it’s a “you got your chocolate in my PB” or vice-versa type of problem.  It’s very close to FriendFeed, which was a great site…if you could get your friends out of Facebook long enough to try it out.  Something tells me that now the push is going to be getting everyone and their dog to either get gmail accounts (and/or Google profiles), or admit to having them…

Of course, there are two drawbacks that I can see.  One is that not everyone is going to find an application for it.  I have Google Wave, and I’m still trying to figure out a use for it.  Really.  It kinda reminds me of Netmeeting in that it has all these great collaboration tools…and everyone’s raving about them…but I have no real-world use for it.  Boo.
The second is that now you’ve got social networking in your email, there will likely be a whole bunch of businesses that will now have gmail firewalled away from its users.  For instance, I know that most major businesses will block Facebook.  Now your mail may be blocked away from you as well.

I will be very up-front in my dislike of Facebook.  Yes, I have it, and I crosspost to it, but I spend as little time on it as possible.  I don’t like the drama of “o noes, you changed my homepage!” every time they change a layout.  I especially hate being pestered to download “apps”.  I don’t care about your farm, your petshop, your bakery, or what quiz you took yesterday.  I’m more inclined to read your status to see what you’re up to in real life than to give a flip about some commercial product that just wants to suck away more of my time.  I very happily use Tweetdeck to skim my friends’ facebook status than having to go to their page, see their advertising, and get pestered by apps.  The worst part?  They’re now invading my email.  I’ve been going through privacy settings to see if there’s any way I can get rid of emails from applications saying “your friend is doing this…why don’t you?”  Well, I have friends who do drugs, but I don’t do those either.  I tend to not hang around folks who try to peer-pressure me into doing things that are bad for me.

I *like* decentralized applications that I can aggregate in my own way.  Twitter?  Fine.  Blog?  Fine.  Facebook?  As long as I don’t have to log into it.  Google Reader?  Great.  Feedly parses it well.  The trick is to find a way to aggregate the feeds & make sense of them all.  If Buzz will do this, all the better.  If Buzz is just another cluttered mess…well…I can’t see myself using it.  It’ll just be another annoyance like Facebook, with nothing but Farmville spam.