RandomFailure

In case you were unaware, the 6 o’clock hour in the Eastern US time zone will be lengthened by one second. This is due to variations in the earth’s rotation; see an article from National Geographic on this.

But this Leap Second does not include the effects of the Indian Ocean earthquake from 2004, which also affected the earth’s rotation. See this Scientific American article.

The other day, I saw a penny on the floor of the men’s room at work. I did not pick it up for two reasons: (1) it’s on the floor of the men’s room, and (2) at my billing rate, it probably wasn’t worth the effort. Anyway, a trip to the men’s later in the day revealed that someone had indeed picked it up. I hope the germs were worth the penny.

I wouldn’t call it a let-down or the “blahs” (whatever they are), but I’m kinda wiped today. Not sure if it just a general lack of sleep or not, but I feel flat. Maybe that should be fat, with all the eating and little running. However, a nice spot of weather (i.e., not that cold) should help with the running part. Unfortunately, the practice of law (at least the patent part of it) does not have a lull this week, so there’s no slowdown at work to make up for the out of office slate of activities.

On the plus side, it is 115 days until my wedding and hopefully less than 60 days before the new house is ready.

Only a few days until Christmas, and there are many presents to wrap. Good thing I’m done shopping. I would say there are also many cookies to bake, but I just don’t have the time for that this year (yes, you cynics, I can bake). There’s probably tons of other stuff that I’m forgetting to do, but I can’t seem to think of it right now. I’m a little distracted by trying to get things finalized for the house. Apparently, they actually want me to pay for it.

Have a Happy or Merry Whatever! (This is a controversy-free greeting.)

DVR is a great thing, especially with its 4x fast-forward speed that lets you fly through boring programs. Hence, it was the ideal way to watch the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show (check it out online here). I managed to zip through it in about 15 minutes. The only thing really worth watching was the “I Want Candy” segment. And Karen, if you want any of those items, I will gladly buy them for you. (Maybe that’ll keep my out of the doghouse with my fiancee.)

In case you didn’t see it, and if you’re not a Duke fan, I imagine that you did not – Sean Dockery’s 40 foot prayer at the buzzer beat Virginia Tech. See the AP story via ESPN.com (no video as of now, though). And through the wonders of DVR, I managed to save the last 8-10 minutes of the broadcast (changing channels limited the time saved). My dad called me about a minute later and I was still laughing.

I haven’t seen a shot like that since Jeff Capel’s 35 footer against UNC in 1995, which I refer to at the Coffee Table Game. At that time, I had a solid wood coffee table (from the surprisingly-still-in-business This End Up furniture company; I guess they just closed all of their mall stores). I was sitting on the couch watching the game, and when Capel hit his shot, I jumped both up off the sofa and out away from the sofa, towards the coffee table. I have no idea how, but I managed to pick up my legs high enough to avoid crashing into or on top of the table, which would have sent my tumbling into the (thankfully) unlit fireplace. If I tried that now, I’d be in the hospital with broken glass embedded in my feet (new coffee table with glass panels).

I don’t know about anyone else, but I don’t think my coffee table can take many more of the holiday catalogs I’ve been getting in the past week. I’ve kept about 20, and instantly tossed at least that many into the recycle pile. I think I’ve received three J. Crew catalogs alone in the last two weeks, which is weird since half the stuff in the catalog they ran out of (trying to buy presents revealed that).

I have no idea what the heck was happening to my computer the other night, but after finally being able to download Firefox 1.5 last night, it works wonderfully with Blogger. Features that I couldn’t access under Safari 1.3.1 now work again – things such as the spell check, some of the post and comment options, and most important for me, being able to preview the page and then go back and change the time of the post. Under Safari, I could preview the post, but going back to make chances obliterated the change time and date drop-downs. It looks like Firefox will be my blog creating browser of choice. Now to test it out on my regular Web surfing…

I have had to be careful with certain things I write about here, since I never know who could wind up reading it. One of those topics was my girlfriend. I had always been reluctant to reveal her name because I didn’t want people from work to know, simply because we work in the same office.

However, I can now reveal Karen’s name, since we disclosed our engagement to everyone at the office today. (I actually proposed back on September 17.) Karen preferred to say that she was “outing” our relationship. As long as there’s no semantic confusion by that word choice, that’s fine. I know she was reveling in the attention on her ring.

Some people said they knew all along (I doubt that).
Some said that they didn’t know (maybe true, but they possibly assumed something).
Someone even went as far to say that they knew we were living together (I have no idea what that person was smoking, but they’ve also never seen my apartment, which is not nearly big enough for the two of us).

The reason for the reveal now is that too many people were seeing us together this week and were asking questions, so we decided to take control of the information flow. Now, nobody ever asked me any questions about whether anything was going on, but I know now that more people assumed that something was going on than we had originally thought.

Oh, well. The information is out now and we don’t have to try to hide anything any more. As for the “20 minutes” comment, when we spoke to the Big Boss last night about it, we discussed how long the news would take to get around the office. My guess was 20 minutes. I think it took about 45 minutes, but I could be wrong since I wasn’t really timing it. Never underestimate the power of the inter-office gossip network.

Pictures to follow soon.