This and that
Previously, on Jed's Life:
I've spent almost all of my outside-of-work time for the past week-plus doing database stuff for the magazine.
The reason that was necessary is that we've brought on some Editorial Assistants who are reading some of the incoming submissions. The database wasn't set up for that, so I needed to add a bunch of stuff to it; and in the process, I discovered some old bad code that needed cleaning up, and added a feature or two that I've been meaning to write for years, and so on.
Kind of fun--I like to potchky around with this kind of stuff--but time- and energy-consuming.
I did take a few breaks. Friday night Kam and I caught up on Sarah Connor (still really good) and Heroes (still mixed; I still love a few of the characters (esp. Hiro and Noah/HRG) but am anywhere from lukewarm to hostile towards others). Saturday night I got up from sitting at my computer in my room all day and went over to Kam's, but I took my laptop so I could sit at my computer in her room. I don't think I left the house at all on Sunday. I think I may've played an hour or so of DDR at some point over the weekend.
What else? Lessee:
In spare moments in the past couple weeks, I've read the first three Enchanted Forest books; liked the first two, was put off by the third, found the ending to the third frustratingly and annoyingly contrived, took a while to get over that before embarking on the fourth.
Read a few subs, rejected a few subs.
Printed and photocopied and mailed a whole bunch of stories to assorted Year's Best editors.
Did some (but not enough) editing.
Watched the first three episodes of MacGyver on DVD. It started out fun, but I started rolling my eyes fairly quickly. The actor is cute, and there are occasional fun moments and lines. (And I had no idea Terry Nation had been involved with the show.) But I'm not getting nearly enough enjoyment out of it to keep watching (and I was only half-watching the 2nd and 3rd eps anyway). . . . From listening to pop-culture descriptions of the show for the past 20 years, I always thought the idea was that the gadgets he came up with were over-the-top ridiculous, like making a machine gun out of paperclips and chewing gum, but that turns out not to be true; I gather that they're even meant to be vaguely scientifically plausible, with a little stretching. I sorta like his habit of picking up/scrounging anything interesting he comes across while he's in a new situation or place, though it reminds me a little bit of playing text adventures.
Have continued to totally fail to write any of the increasingly overdue responses I owe various people to emails. Very sorry. Am going to try to get my act together over the next couple days.
Was pleased to see the new Mac laptops released. Haven't yet decided whether I'm going to get one. My MacBook has been increasingly erratic lately: kernel panics, crashes, error messages to the effect that apps won't open (I think that's a low-memory thing, but I'm not sure), all kind of distressing stuff. But I keep reminding myself that getting a new computer may not be the easiest or cheapest way to resolve such issues.
Had dinner with Twig the other night. Oh, and on Saturday night I found out that a nearby Chinese fast-food place, Canton, which I've avoided for years on the grounds that it looked cheap and bad, is actually fairly tasty and has very fast and friendly service. Went there again tonight; got large amounts of fairly good lemon chicken and veggie chow mein, hot off the stove, with friendly service, for reasonable prices.
(Continued next entry.)