Yesterday was a pretty pleasant day, for part of it. The morning went relatively well, and I had lunch with Steph, where we talked some biz, as well as the normal wide-ranging conversation. Then I stopped by at the Dunn Brothers in my old neighborhood to read for a while before walking past my old place and chatting with my old mailman and landlords. I was in a pretty good mood when I got home.
But there was a call from Mom on my caller-ID. She was feeling lonely and depressed and asked if I could come up to visit. I called her back, and after a half-hour on the phone we agreed that I’d be up sometime this weekend, but wasn’t sure when. Part of it is that I don’t want to promise to come up on Sunday if the Saints playoff series goes to five games (there will be a game on Saturday for sure). Yes, it’s selfish, but that’s part of how I maintain my sanity, too.
After that, my afternoon was pretty non-productive. I keep trying to convince mom that she should go into the senior center in town once in a while so she’s not alone all the time, but she doesn’t like that idea, and I’m stumped. She doesn’t want to be alone, and doesn’t want to visit people, either. It’s frustrating for both of us, and that frustration kept me from concentrating on work. Finally around 5pm I just bagged it and decided to eat dinner and watch a movie to relax. It worked.
Oh well. I imagine that’ll work itself out one way or another eventually. Meanwhile, I’ll keep plugging along. What’s normally my most productive day of the week (now that I don’t have neighborhood meetings followed by a trip to the bar on Tuesday evenings) got pretty well shut down this week though, and I’ll be paying for that today.
- Here’s a list of Ten CSS tricks you may not know. There are a couple I was unaware of in there. [holy schmoly]
- Over at A List Apart, there’s an article on Pocket-Sized Design: Taking Your Website to the Small Screen. All well and good, if a bit Opera-centric. I’d like to see more sites (including this one) work better on handhelds, but my handheld of choice is a palm running Blazer. I wish someone would write a similar article that covered other handheld browsers better. [zeldman]
- Cool. Here’s the slides from Theo’s talk on Exploit Mitigation Techniques that he gave at this year’s AUUG conference. It gives a nice overview on the security enhancements they’ve been making to OpenBSD over the years. [openbsd]
- Johannes Ullrich is the CTO of the SANS institute’s Internet Storm Center, and is Someone to watch over the ’Net, and this article details a day in his life, in particular, the one where he was tracking the MyDoom-O virus. [slashdot]
- NASA’s Genesis probe crashed to earth yesterday. The parachute didn’t open, which would have made it pretty tough for the helicopters to catch. Oops. No word yet on whether they’ll be able to recover anything useful from the science package.
- It says here that Gmail is too creepy, and some people won’t send email to gmail accounts. First I’ve heard of it, but it makes some sense, I guess. You’d think I’d be farther ahead of the curve on paranoid stuff like this, but I must be slipping. [some guy]