1. December, 2003 - home stretch
- December looks like it’s going to be a busy month, but when it’s done, I should be able to relax a little. Here are the big things on my to-do list for the month:
- Finish up the software project I’ve been working on for a client this year. We’re going to ship sometime in December. If we don’t, I want to make sure it’s not me that’s holding things up.
- Move into my new house, including things like getting the floors refinished and getting my office moved without screwing up #1.
- Figure out my taxes. I’m behind on withholding, and will need to get the proper amount of money sent off to Washington and St. Paul before the year’s over in order to avoid penalties.
- Send out the Christmas Cards. I still need to sort out the list of people who are getting cards, plus write something that I can jam into the cards.
- Get some Christmas shopping done. Hopefully I can do this all online, but I’m either going to have to get to it soon (so things can be delivered here) or put it off until the last possible moment so I’m at the new house to receive deliveries.
This doesn’t even start to cover all the smaller tasks I have to get done. Some of them are sub-tasks of the big things listed above, but there are also plenty of small things that are completely independent. Doesn’t mean that they don’t have to get done, though. And with all this stuff to do, how did I spend the holiday weekend? Watched season four of Buffy on DVD and spent Saturday night hanging out with friends.
- Speaking of friends, I continued to play with Friendster over the weekend. I continue to be frustrated by how slow the server is, but I’ve managed to connect with twenty friends there. The biggest frustration is that the gallery function there (which is supposed to allow you to search friends of friends for potential dates) doesn’t return anything about half the time, and returns inconsistent results the rest of the time. It also has pretty weak search-functionality: why can’t I do a search of
people who are within two friends of me who live within twenty miles of Omaha
if I’m planning to travel there (I’m not) so I can maybe find some dinner companions on a trip to a strange city? That’s the kind of thing that seems as though it would make friendster a lot more useful to me, but they only let you search within a certain distance of you home, and always out to four links away.
- So you know how I pointed to the video about the iPod battery issue? Well, turns out the guys who made the video have Neistat’s Dirty Secret. If you watched the video, go check it out. [boing boing]
- New from John Walker: JavaScrypt, a suite of browser-based cryptography tools, including a tutorial to show how to use the various features of JavaScrypt. [ntk]
- Eastside Food Co-op, opening this week, is triumph of community organizing. I’m not sure if I’ll end up shopping there or not, but if I do, it’ll almost certainly be at the expense of North Country Co-op. [strib]
- Woman trampled at Walmart is a hilarious read. It shows the depth of caring for people by employees of Walmart. A woman is hospitalized after being trampled in a scramble for a DVD player. Walmart employees later called her sister to check on her and let them know that they’ll put a DVD player on hold.
Their major concern? …we want her to return as a shopper.
For more on Walmart go to Walmartsucks.com. [jim]
Copyright 2008, Dave Polaschek.
Last updated on Mon, 01 Dec 2003 07:57:26.