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Crazy Day

Just for shits and giggles, I signed up on all those blogariffic sites out there: blo.gs, weblogs.com, BlogStreet, Blogrolling, syndic8.com, and updated my Technorati profile. I also set MT to accept trackback pings and to ping a few of the sites I signed up on, to let them know I updated. So, to anyone who finds my humble site or feed through one of those sites, welcome. I’m not always terribly interesting… but neither are the other friends and strangers whose blogs I frequent myself, so I’m in good company.

I’m not particularly motivated to do anything this evening. Work really drained me today. The stress I felt today was reminiscent of my days back in Lockbox:

24 September 2002: Just Another Day…

Hey, for once I worked an 8-hour day! Yeah, we were doing so well that we actually took a one-hour lunch and everything. Just for reference, yesterday I worked a 14-hour day. Seriously. My co-worker and almost-supervisor, Loni, worked an hour and a half more than me, since she came in at 6am. Damn, that sucked. Makes the normal 8-hour day seem like a luxury instead of a burden.

Being one of three people manning the Loan Corrections Team Line (aka ‘working the phones’) wasn’t horrible, although I had twice as many calls as usual. And doing loan changes wasn’t all that bad, either, although I had several requests that I had to call people about and wait around for answers. But all those things together made for one damn hectic day. I felt like I was going in six different directions all day—I’d hang up the phone from one call, go to start a loan change, get another call, have to do research for that call, finally get back to that loan change I’d started, then get another call, then finally finish that first loan change, then have to call someone about a detail of the next loan change… Yeesh. My desk has at this moment about seven different stacks of paper of varying heights and degrees of importance.

That really sucked away any sort of energy, creative or otherwise, that I might have had in reserve for my Me Time this evening.

So… that’s today.

Remind me: why did I syndicate this again?

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Mmm… Free iPod…

iPod As opposed to Aaron‘s idea of getting an iPod and paying it off over one interest-free year, thanks to credit from Musician’s Friend, I got sucked into the Get a Free iPod craze.

Yes, there’s always a catch, and this offer is no exception. First, you have to complete an offer—I chose to sign up for BMG, which was pretty painless. I didn’t really expect even this much of the process to work… but, lo and behold, I received an e-mail from the nice FreeiPods.com people today, saying that I’d completed my offer.

Well, hot damn.

Now all I have to do is shill my friends.

See, that’s Step 2: I have to refer five friends to the site and get them to complete offers, too. The best offers listed are the BMG signup that I did, maybe the Blockbuster Online deal (sounds like NetFlix to me), or join the Columbia House DVD Club, or subscribe to USA Today (that wouldn’t be bad). Of course, if you don’t have enough credit cards in your wallet, there’s over half a dozen of those to try out for, too.

Soooo… if you’re so inclined, please consider yourself invited to check out the Free iPods scheme. If not… well… Aaron’s probably going to buy himself one, anyway. I’m sure he’ll share.

Right, honey-muffin…?

the ongoing saga of my job

Blogging at Work?!

Here’s a revolution in technology: Not-Really-Realtime Blogging. This bleeding-edge technique allows for employees in a network-monitored work environment to write blog entries during the day, and post them with a backdated timestamp as soon as they return home to a blog-safe network.

It’s called e-mail. 😛

So, here I sit, at the reception desk, taking my required turn manning the desk. Sure, I still have my normal work to do (loan changes this week), but it gets awful boring out here with no music to listen to and no conversations to eavesdrop on. So, while no one is walking past the desk, I’m taking a few moments to blog to myself, for posting when I get home.

I decided to go on Induction this week, to jump-start myself back into losing weight. I haven’t gained any weight recently—in fact, I lost half a pound after Thanksgiving weekend. How I managed that, I’m not entirely sure, as I ate like… well, like normal, like everybody else. Sweet potatoes and mashed potatoes and stuffing and pie and ice cream and cupcakes… I was so full. Ugh. I couldn’t eat like that all the time. Not anymore.

Anyway, I’m currently at an even 200 lbs, in case you’ve been jonesing for a weight-loss update. I think my lowest point was 199.5, and that was about three months ago. I’ve been steady at 200.5 ever since. I’ve been fairly content up until recently, since my new weight felt so much more normal than fifty pounds ago. Now, though, I’m feeling frumpy again, and realizing that I still have another 20 or 25 pounds to go before I’ll feel REALLY normal.

Well, people are starting to trickle out of the building, and I should really get some more work done before I go in another hour. This wasn’t too bad of an afternoon out at the reception desk, though… chatting with myself (and with James, who covered my break) really helped to pass the time.

Wouldn’t want to do it every day, though.

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Movable Type 3.1 Upgrade Successful

Well, everything seems to have gone smoothly with the MT upgrade. I tried putzing with the “dynamic page generation,” but all it seemed to do was b0rk my one category page (although it did reduce the rebuild time). So, I’m not using the dynamic page generation yet… not until I do a little more research and find out what the big hype is all about.

I do know that there’s a lot about this whole thing that I haven’t been utilizing to its fullest extent, even with the old version of MT. For instance, I’d wanted to include a different sidebar (see right) with each category index page—say, photography links for my Photography category, and low-carb links for my Atkins category, and links to concert tours and reviews and such for my Reviews category. It seems that, while MT still doesn’t support what I’d wanted to do, there is a plug-in that can do this for me. So, I’ll probably mess with that sometime tomorrow.

There’s plenty of other blog things for me to research in the future, too, like pinging for trackbacks and such. I just can’t think of any mainstream blog tracker thingy that would give a shit if little ol’ me had an update. :-/ Do people really just surf off of places like blo.gs or weblogs.com?

Since I switched to PHP, and deleted all my HTML-based individual archives, I’ve also been having some visitors get 404 Not Found messages. D’oh! So, I need to go into my HostRocket Control Panel and make a custom 404 Error page saying to try changing the .htm to a .php to view the page. Awfully ghetto of me, but… *shrug*

Anyway, fun times ahead. Prepare to see more happy categorized entries from Yours Truly. @whee!