Today was a big retirement day at work; a guy down the hall retired (he’d been counting down the days on his door for a while, down to small fractions earlier this week), as did a long-time colleague from the Computing Facility — she spent her last week getting a dozen or so new printers installed, though she did finish up in time for a nice going-away cake this afternoon. And one of Diane’s co-workers at the Silicon Valley Lab also retired today; he’s been telecommuting for a bit but will still be missed.

On a slightly different note, I’ve discovered a problem with lifetime subscriptions. Usually, when you subscribe to a magazine, it takes a few weeks for them to start the subscription, and it starts with whatever issue is current when they get around to it. No problem, because they’ll send you the full number of issues, and so I’ll get an issue or two after your subscription has actually expired. But with a lifetime subscription, the issues you miss at the beginning of the subscription never get made up. Sure, the publisher will probably keep sending the magazine for a while after you expire, but that doesn’t really do you much good, does it?

We ordered a pile of toys from eToys back on the 14th, and they finally delivered the last box of goodies today. Luckily, this box didn’t have anything that we had to have any time soon — it’s all stuff to have in reserve for upcoming parties so we don’t have to run to ToysRUs at the last minute. Jeffrey’s birthday present arrived in one of the earlier shipments — I’m glad eToys didn’t really mean it when they said it was out-of-stock ten days after I’d placed the order.

Tomorrow’s Jeffrey’s birthday; I suspect he’ll be easy to get moving tomorrow morning!

Hmmm…seems to me I’ve read a slogan much like that before, but with other words instead of “blogging”.

At any rate, life has been pleasantly busy for the past week; I didn’t even know about the ETP outage until it was over (and I’d like to add my vote of thanks to Dave and Userland for making this weblog possible and easy, if not strictly necessary). It looks like we’ll continue busy for the forseeable future, too, but I do hope to check in here more regularly again.

Right now, there are four projects getting my attention; in no particular order, they are: closing the books on 2000 and doing my taxes (joy, joy…); planning our trip to Las Vegas (we need to pick a hotel soon); working on my first Sash application in time to enter it into our departmental contest in two weeks; and helping Jeffrey do his 5th grade state report on Minnesota.

For the last one, I’m the designated technology consultant and Internet search specialist — I even have a trophy attesting to my skill at Internet searching, earned at the First Internet Bowl at Internet World in Boston in 1995 (see this press clipping or repeat this Google search if you don’t believe me, though I can’t find any pictures of the trophy, which is in the trophy case at work). But Jeffrey still has to do the work, and he’s none too thrilled about that!