Month: March 2005

Well, it’s the end of the first week working with Craig. Despite a rather tight fit in the ol’ basement office (see photo) things seem to be going really well. He’s picking up the code very quickly (no surprise there) and has already been a huge help. Plus, he’s fun to have around and even tolerates my eclectic tastes in music.

(I have to say nice things about him, since he occasionally takes a gander at this journal…)

Yesterday I cleaned out my office in preparation for shuffling the furniture to make room for my first real employee. In the process I was sorting through an entire bookshelf of old manuals and such, and came across…

the manual for my very first PC — a 386-33 beast!

That’s right, fifteen years ago I bought a $2,000+ system for college, and thank heavens I still had the manual for how to operate the motherboard. Hoo boy, that sure came in handy over the years.

In the end, I filled an entire trash can with stuff like that, including the definitive guide to Microsoft Access version 2 (!) and the first version of Quattro Pro (that’s right, the text-based DOS version).

As I prepare to expand the ol’ business and hire a full-time employee (he starts Monday, woo hoo!) I have to figure out how to arrange my office. Rather than renting space downtown like I did a year or so ago, I decided to just work in the basement for a while and save some expense.

Of course, my office is really only big enough for one, so it’s going to be a trick to get two desks in there. Luckily, Laralee has experience arranging things like this– she creates little graph-paper scale models and slides them around until they fit. Using this advanced scientific approach, she figured out a way to make it work. I guess I’ll find out Saturday when I reassemble the desks…

“The best way to have a good idea… is to have lots of ideas.”

— Linus Pauling

The other night I was goofing around with a new address book system, and I noticed a place where you can upload a picture for a contact person. Just for kicks I dug up a couple of mug shots and added them to some random contacts. Nothing really exciting seemed to happen so I forgot about it.

But then I was using my e-mail and noticed those pictures suddenly started appearing in mail from those people. Hilarious. Now I get a smiling face from the people in my address book…

“Happiness is when what you think, what you say, and what you do are in harmony.”

— Mohandas Gandhi

I suppose it was only a matter of time before Bill Gates received his knighthood from the Queen of England. Too bad he can’t use the title “sir” (he’s not a British citizen).

I went skiing over the weekend with Sarah and Brad. What a hoot.

It was cold, so on the lift we pretty much covered all exposed skin. It makes us look a little scary and definitely weird…