Verily, I am enjoying my time off. I don't know if I can go back to work (well, at least at Cadence, anyway) at this rate.

Today, I paid various bills and taxes, had Chinese food from the real Chinese menu at the Lucky Chinese restaurant (a favorite haunt of my Chinese coworkers -- and now I understand why), and cleaned my office (at home) a bit.

Tomorrow, I'm going to start on my taxes, though I don't expect to finish; I'm going to have to review the finer points of capital gains tax laws. Ugh. (I'd feel less bleh if the capital gains were actually anything substantial, but it's just the Neolinear stock I bought back in 2000.)

I can't deal with work anymore. I'm taking tomorrow, Monday, and Tuesday off.

I'm also trying to use up my three floating holidays because they don't pay those out if you quit or are laid off. The latter is a real possibility -- basically, the animosity between myself an my manager was reflected in my performance review. (This actually pleases me in a sick way... I'm hoping to get laid off so I can get the severance package.)

Can anyone make heads or tails of the Levitra couches?

Stuck in Chicago. My 2:30 flight was canceled, rebooked on a flight at 10:20 tomorrow morning.

My cats are going to be pissed.

Thanks for all the well-wishes and condolances. It means a lot to me. My grandmother's wake is set for Thursday, funeral and burial on Friday. I'm flying out on Thursday, returning on Saturday.

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In lighter news, I thought I'd share an exchange at work outside my cube:

Coworker 1: Did you see that e-mail I sent?
Coworker 2: I don't check my e-mail every five minutes. I have work to do.
Coworker 3: Not for long!

(Yes, it was intended as humorous, not malicious.)

My grandmother passed away at 6:30 this morning.

I find it incredibly amusing that "god uses emacs" and "god uses vi" both produce exactly one hit.

(No, not a Googlewhack, because I used quotes and three words.)

How spooks saved Ukraine

The New York Times has an excellent article on how Ukraine's spy agency averted a civil war [6 pages] in the recent election.

If this weren't in the NYT, I'd swear it were an excerpt from some fictional Tom Clancy work. I also can't believe that they were able to get this information.

I'm not sure why I invest the time in doing stuff like this, but here's the start of my latest project...

Some links to entertain you:

Do you use Firefox? Take a look at this serious bug.

Like riding ferries? Like Norway? Let MSN Maps help you. Or, if you'd prefer, you can see more of Europe on your trip.

Via , some nerdy LOTR humour.

And, lastly, a page with some funny/interesting/bizarre movie clips.

Buggery

Wow. CBS has posted the complete independent panel investigation report [PDF, 234 pages] which led to the ousting of four CBS executives and, possibly, Dan Rather himself.

Apparently, blogging substantially accelerated the questioning of the documents. Interesting.

I'd like to know how to go about making a living doing this sort of investigative work. I'm very impressed by it; it's not the typical regurgitated bullshit that you would get by hiring a consulting firm.

I mean, doing this in a way other than ignoring my normal work and blogging during work hours. :-)

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I spent a few dollars yesterday to pick up a copy of SimCity 4. Aww yeah. I've missed this game. This version, though, is a bit more complex than I'd care for. In particular, I don't care for the interactive dispatching of police and firemen (what city has the mayor doing that?) and the interactive missions that pop up allowing you to gain karma and/or money. SimCity is not an action game, and should not strive to become one.

The soundtrack, though, is superb. They even allow you do download it.

There's a report that Texas improperly spent Homeland Security funds on a trailer to take lawn mowers to lawn mower drag races.

Yes. The National Drag Racing - Lawn Mower Association has more details about this event.

I feel like I've now seen the entire Internet. National Watermelon Promotion Board

Bonus points if you can figure out what Google search resulted in getting to this page.

For those who haven't heard, LiveJournal was acquired by Six Apart, the makers of MovableType and TypePad. I'm somewhat baffled by this; I guess I still think of LiveJournal as a hobby-slash-community-project thing rather than a business. From a business perspective, I can't see how this benefits Six Apart unless they make substantial changes to LJ, contrary to 's claims. Either make it a showcase for your technology (move it all to MT and integrate LJ-specific features into MT/TP) and/or consolidate LJ and TP to reduce your costs.

Having been through an acquisition myself with many promises made and broken, I think Brad is being terribly naive here. Ah, well. It's his company, not mine.

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In unrelated geek news, I have strung together a set of filters which now copies any non-spam mail sent to my normal e-mail address to my cell phone. We'll see how well this works.

I happened to come across a page describing surgical debriedment of abscess subsequent to self-envenomation -- with pictures.

In other words, the page documents the lancing of an abscess. Now, this is commonly-performed technique in a doctor's office -- the catch here is that the patient was a cobra snake.