Domestic Geek

Marcus sent me the following ecard to me at work today for Valentine's Day:



If you don't know what it says, copy the following, go to http://nickciske.com/tools/binary.php and put it in the binary box to decode it.

01001001 00100000 01101100 01101111 01110110 01100101 00100000 01111001 01101111 01110101

Isn't he a sweetie?

There was quite a swing of good news and bad news as I drove in to work this morning. I heard on the radio that a FedEx driver had been killed south of Larkspur when a Toyota hit it and forced it to roll over close to the Greenland exit on SB I-25. Since the KOA chopper was in the area for the crash, they were close enough to witness a dog that had fallen through the ice in a Perry Park lake. That is the subdivision where my boss lives. I passed the Larkspur firefighters leaving the scene on my way to work. I watched the first video below when I got to work and even though I knew that they had rescued the dog, I was bawling. That makes two days in a row of crying like a baby. Yesterday, I was watching Super Bowl commercials while I ate lunch and the one with the Budweiser Clydesdale foal (Clydesdale American Dream) had me turning on the waterworks.

Here's videos of the dog rescue from KCNC:
Complete Dog Rescue Near Perry Park Country Club (really long!)
Firefighters Rescue Dog From Icy Waters
Saved Dog and Owners Thank Larkspur Firefighters

I think I have mentioned that Blingo is the bomb! I won a 2nd iTunes gift certificate this morning. That makes three prizes in all. Now, if only I could win a shuffle or an iPod on there, they would totally rule.

I need a script (either prewritten or done by me) to process InDesign files into PDFs. That would so help our file workflow here. Certainly something like that exists already that can be tweaked a little. I keep trying to research that today, but I keep getting interrupted. Oh, well. It will give me something to do some other day.

I don't feel like pretending to work today. It's Friday and even though I like my job, I want to go home and play hookey. I've been just practicing Photoshop stuff—doing tutorials and stuff. It would be nice if people would help me out and send me some stuff for their ads so I would have something to do!!!!

I've been playing Sims 2 too much. Last night I dreamt that one of my sims had horrible heartburn and even though I gave it all sorts of remedies, the heartburn wouldn't go away. I woke up and realized it was I that had heartburn! Too funny.

Well, I just finished lunch, so I'd better get back to the Internet and see if I can learn anything before somebody calls my name.

My ladonnasworld.com domain expired last month. I didn't realize it until I went to make a post from work today and I couldn't reach the server! I had signed up with my old Lycos mail account, but since that has become nothing but spam, I hardly check it anymore. I almost couldn't renew the domain because I had to provide the three digit code on the back of my debit card and it is practically illegible. Fortunatley, Namesecure didn't lock me out after trying several possible combinations.

I had thought about letting it go since I'm going to try and get a new domain for my blog in the near future. I'm not sure what I'm going to do with this one then. I decided that I want to keep it for sentimental reasons. Marcus bought me this domain originally for a Christmas gift. Maybe for my portfolio or something. I suppose I'll think of something to do with it when that time comes.

I've had a horrible sinus headache for a couple of days that finally let loose today. Work is going really slow. The ad deadline is the 2nd week of March and it seems everybody procrastinates almost as bad as I do. Early March will be super busy, but now.....(crickets chirping).

Speaking of procrastination (of which I am Queen), I finally got some kind of confirmation from the place at which I applied for student loan consolidation that they are actually consolidating some of the loans. I sent that damned application in at the end of June (needed to be received before July 1). It takes seven (7!) months to do paperwork? I know they had a flood of applications then, but would've it been so hard to send a card saying we've received the application and you'll hear something back from us when hell freezes over? By the end of December, I had given up on hearing from them and was starting to look into applying with someone else. I hope this takes some of the financial stress off of me caused by taking an entry-level job. I have another loan payment slated to start in either March or April. I was thinking I was going to have to find a part-time job somewhere else, but now maybe I can just get by on doing some freelance work here and there.

I installed this cool Firefox extension on my PC that allows search engines in the search bar to be deleted. Unfortunately, it doesn't work on the Mac. I need to remember to research how to do it manually.

Ugh, my headache seems to be returning. I'm going to go be a bum and watch TV from the couch all evening.

I just got this photo from one of my co-workers that he took a couple of weeks ago. Aren't you jealous of my work environment?

I'm all for any software that allows you to free yourself from the evil giant, Microsoft. Another co-worker pointed me to Flip4Mac WMV, a component that allows .wmv files to be played through Quicktime.