Friday Night Thoughts

Whew.

Home.

It has been a LONG work week. I just got home a little bit ago, from the office, and it’s 8:45pm. We’re not only just really busy, but we’re down a couple of people on my team. I’ve been the last one out of the building just about every night this week. And looking back at what’s transpired, I’ve seen my pending caseload, which I’d been working slowly down, almost double in just four days. And with great caseload comes great load of phone calls! My phone’s been ringing off the hook. Voice mails have been stacking up. People want my blood. It’s been trying, it’s been frantic, it’s been ugly. But tonight, worn by it all as I was, I made myself stay until every last one of today’s claims was opened up and worked, and all before the system went down at 8pm. That felt good. I wasn’t feeling great when it was around 4:00 to 5:00, and would really have preferred to head home. But I stuck it out and pushed myself, and was glad, in the end, that I did. Fact – that feeling of leaving your undone work behind and going off to do something more enjoyable is nothing compared to the feeling of knowing you got it all done. There’s actual cognitive discord going on in the back of your head when you know, even subconsciously, that you left something big undone and you’ll have to get back to it later. When you just get it done (my “eating your vegetables first” theory of life management, one I’m occasionally good at following), there’s not just the sense of accomplishment, but the sense of mental peace. Which, thankfully, I have tonight.

So it’s coming up on 9:00, and I’m on my patio, and very relaxed. By the way, I can answer the question for you of why people chose to live in California. February just ended, and I’m sitting outside at nine o’clock, and it’s 60 degrees. Ahhhhh. I came out here with my laptop and a cigar (a well-earned one). And for that little extra bit of perfect nightness, I punched an H. Upmann Robusto here with JUST the right draw. Not too tough, not too easy. Cue my Antonia Banderas voice – “It’s like a woman. You don’t want to her to give into you too easily.” Okay, that was creepy… It’s cloudy out, but that’s what’s keeping the temp so pleasant, so no complaints. I’ll make some dinner in a bit, and watch another ep of “The Wire” (season 2) when I do, and will probably get to some emails and parts of a project or two before I call it a night (and I won’t be up TOO late, because I’ve got to wake up, log on to my work system from here at home, and continue working tomorrow), but for now, just enjoying a good cigar, a fine evening, a sense optimism, and a calm bit of serenity.

So thought I’d share a couple of thoughts while I’m out here.

First off…does anyone else have a “My Yahoo” page? I’ve been meaning to hip people to this for a while now, for those who don’t know about it. Yahoo’s not the only one who offers these customized home pages, but it’s the one I use, and it’s nice and easy to use and enjoy.

Basically, it’s a web page that you fill with content you want. You just need a Yahoo account. Just go to www.yahoo.com and use the “sign up” option if you don’t already have one. Then find the link to build yourself a page. I’ve set mine as my home page, so it’s there whenever I pull up a browser (or whenever I click the “home” button if I want to get back to it at any given time). You can choose your own colors. Mine are green, of course. You can also choose your page format, and I have a three-column one myself. And you can choose from a lot of different content that you want to access regularly to fill those columns. For me, I’ve got the current weather in the upper right of mine (this time of year I’m weather-obsessed, just counting the minutes until spring and summer), but I’ve also got it set up to show me weather in cities where people I know live (Boise, Seattle, Chicago, Tampa, Rincon (Puerto Rico) and where I’d just like to be at any given moment (Dublin, San Diego, Sydney, Honolulu, Nassau). Keeps me sane during the winter. Right above the weather is the spot where the link to my Fantasy Sports teams is, but that’s only during football season these days. Below the weather is an airfare tracker, showing me up-to-the-minute airline prices from Sac to places I want to travel to (both practical trips and fantasy vacations). Below that, I’ve got the NBA scoreboard.

Center column is where most of my content is, in the form of news and blogs. You can chose from many different kinds of news categories, and each one will show you a handful of the current top stories, and you can click on those to read the article. I’ve got national news in the form of Reuters top stories. I also have NBA news, entertainment news, local news in Sacramento, San Diego, and Ireland, plus space news (I (heart) the space program), comic industry news (hey…I’m a professional, damnit!) and some other nerd news (like Slashdot for the latest tech stuff). You can also subscribe to any blog that has an RSS feed, so I can always see what’s been newly posted from friends of mine like Martin, Jim, Summer and Jeni, of from amusing folk like comic creator Evan Dorkin.

Column three has useful stuff like a domain tracker (any time I think up a domain name, I can type it in and see if anyone’s taken it, and if not, I can jump over to my provider and buy it real quick for future use), Yahoo Yellow Pages (for any time I need a phone number or an address in any city), and my very handy movie listings section. You can punch in your zip code and pull up all the theaters around you, chose the ones you go to, and instantly see what’s playing when. I’ve also got a couple other news sources here, like election news, science news, and a handy urban legend one (so I can learn, ahead of time, about the new virus or cell phone scare hoax that a friend or relative will surely be emailing me about (along with everyone else they know) soon.

It’s really handy having all this stuff on one page. And this is particularly true at work. Not only do I not have time to surf the web at work, but a number of sites will end up blocked anyway. This way, I can just pull up my Yahoo page at different times during the day and find out what’s happening the world in just a few seconds. This way I don’t have to catch up on everything later when I get home. Very handy.

If you don’t have one, give it a try. Once you set it up, just go to your page (just type in www.my.yahoo.com) and, while you’re there, click on your browser’s drop-down menu for “tools”, go to “options”, and you’ll see a spot where you can choose your home page. Just click the button for “use current page”, and you’re set. Next time you open your browser, you’ll be at your own personal Yahoo page with all your goodies. And there’s loads of goodies you can customize to you. Horoscopes, stock monitors, you name it. And then next time you’re at a site that has an RSS feed, you can just click the button there to add it, and it will give you the option to add it to your Yahoo page. Boom, it’s there. And you can change your page and rearrange it as often as you like. You’ll love it. Give it a try.

Speaking of urban legends, I can’t stress this enough.

Start going to Snopes.com.

Next time you get that forwarded email that warns about a new virus, or tells you Obama is backed by the KKK, or that Bill Gates is going to send you thousands of dollars for forwarding emails, before you get tempted to pass it on, go look it up on Snopes. This is a very well-researched site, and very up to date, that’s got the real news on all this crap people send around to each other…most of which is just that – crap. Do a search, get the real facts, and do what I do – copy the link to that article and email it, immediately, to the person who sent you the email. The point is not to make them feel dumb or gullible. The point is to keep them from feeling dumber and gullibler by continuing to pass it along. I was very happy to see they had a page on the Renuzit “penis can” legend that became such a big pain in the ass for me when I was working for the Dial Corp in the mid-90s. All the facts are there. And if the internet was bigger back then, I wouldn’t have had to answer all those lame calls about it. But that’s a blog for another time…

Okay. Relaxation (and cigar) over with. Got to go make some dinner and catch some tube. And since it’s Friday night, I might actually watch the WHOLE episode of the Wire in one sitting (I usually have to break them up over two nights due to short evening time after the extra hours at work). Got some office work to do tomorrow (which I can do on my patio), and some home projects to get to. A LOT of home projects. Busy weekend ahead. But not going to think about that until tomorrow. Tonight, just going to ride this peaceful feeling and enjoy my night, and enjoy my home, and enjoy that fact that I HAVE a job…and a laptop…and a PC…and a nice HD TV set with a pretty good sound system. Life is good. That’s the big story for this Friday night.

Enjoy yours.