short bits

August 25, 2004 · Comments

# Eric is still unemployed, but hopefully won’t be for long. There are opportunities to be had, the stars just have to line up. Note: a really, really, really bad time to lose your job in the New York City metropolitan area is a few weeks before the Republican National Convention. Everyone is either on vacation or getting ready to start vacation and doesn’t want to talk about hiring right now. But his resume is *everywhere* and there has been some interest.
# I’m used to having a certain level of activity and noise in the house during the weekday daytime hours and this week Eric and the kids are home. A challenge to get done what I need to do. And here I thought my daughter was the one in the family who was stuck on her routines.
# Speak of routines, I got myself hooked on “The Amazing Race” this summer. Thanks, Tivo. I credit (or blame, as the case may be) Tivo because it doesn’t care that the New York stations move the show all over the place to accommodate baseball. It finds it, it records it. I realized that’s why I got into this season when I lost interest in previous years. I lost interest after missing an episode or two before, now I can watch a few episodes in a row, sans commercials and annoying Colin scenes, in half the time. A. That host guy is adorable! and B. I love Chip & Kim (the married parents) and I’m rooting for them to win. They are exactly the kind of people I would be friends with.
# I finally decided to join the crowd and get a GMail account. Someone on a mailing list offered up an invitation with no strings attached and I jumped at it. Now I see why people have been tripping over themselves for invites. I’m not changing my main email address to a gmail address, but for now I’ve transferred over all my mailing lists and newsletter subscriptions. It’s nice to have an inbox that’s just an inbox of work-related and personal mail. Reading threaded conversations (such as those you’d see in a mailing list) is a pleasure in the GMail interface, and I never thought I’d like reading web-based email. I hate the webmail offered by my hosting account, for example, and I only use it when I absolutely have to. GMail is much better than that.
# After waiting about 4 weeks, we were notified today that our phone number officially switches over to “Vonage”:http://www.vonage.com tomorrow. Saving about $60 a month on our phone bill couldn’t have come at a better time. I can tell that the sound quality isn’t quite as good as it was with the POTS (plain old telephone service) line, but for $30 a month for unlimited local and long distance I’ll deal with my calls all sounding like they’re coming from a cell phone.

Related posts: