Monday, July 20, 1998

        When I got up and got online this morning (which was actually closer to noon), I didn't have any email, which is a really unusual occurrence. It's possible, but not likely. Just like regular mail, if I have a mailbox empty of even junk mail, I know there's something wrong. I sent myself a couple of test messages, and I didn't get them, so I emailed tech support at my ISP. After I did that, though, I realized that they couldn't email me back to let me know what was wrong until they fixed it.

        I decided that, since I couldn't do anything about it, and since I wasn't really in the mood to write, I'd go out for a little while. Just as I was getting ready to leave the house, the phone rang. It was a tech support person from my ISP. He had looked up my phone number in their records and was calling to let me know that they had reconfigured their mail servers, and in order to get my mail I had to change the configuration of my mail program. It was a simple change, and once I made it, email started downloading.

        I thought it was pretty strange that they didn't send out some sort of email notice before they made the change. All they would have had to do was send out a broadcast message, but apparently no one thought of that. Somewhat unbelievable, since I assume that all of their other subscribers are having the same problem. Oh well, I guess it isn't my problem. It just seems strange.

        Once I finally left the house, I stopped and had lunch at Subway, then went to a different Stein Mart to see if they had any more area rugs on sale. They didn't have the same ones that I bought the other day, but they had some different ones, also on sale. I don't even remember if I mentioned that I bought some last week. Some nice woven earthtone dhurrie rugs to put in front of the doors in place of the somewhat ugly rubber-backed ones that are there now. They're not horrible, but I wanted some nicer ones. These are pretty. And I also bought a lunch box.

        I may be carrying this "first day of work/school" analogy a little too far . . .

        Well, it's not really a lunchbox, it's a "lunch tote," an insulated bucket-shaped bag with a shoulder strap. I don't know if I'll even end up using it, but I liked the shape and it was $5.00, so I went ahead and bought it.

        The rest of the night is sort of a blur . . . I made a nice dinner--spaghetti with tomato sauce and vegetables--but Bob wasn't interested since I didn't have a large piece of meat to serve with it, and had a peanut butter sandwich and a bowl of cereal. So I had spaghetti and vegetables, went upstairs for awhile and worked on the checking account statements, then came back down and worked on Javascript stuff for awhile. I'm really starting to like it, I think, or at least to begin to understand some of the things that it can do. For instance, I wish I had had this script when I was counting down the days 'til my last day at work:

[This used to be a Javascript application. It caused an error message in IE, then my friend Mike re-wrote the script and said that it worked in IE on his computer, but it still wouldn't work on mine, so I've pulled it until I can figure out a script that works everywhere. If there is such a thing . . .]

        That's a really simple script, it makes a mathematical calculation based on a target date and plugs in the number of days left until that date. Kind of fun, though, like the one on my front page that picks up the date from the computer the viewer is using and puts up the current day and date and an appropriate greeting depending on the time of day. I like things like that, things that change depending on various factors. Funnily enough, what I really wanted to do was make the number of days red, not the rest of the sentence. I can't seem to affect the number itself by changing the font or the color.

        What's also interesting is that it won't be static. Looking at this page now, I see this sentence:

There are only 6 days left until I start my new job.

        When you look at it, though, it could very well have already changed to "5 days," in fact it probably will, since it's nearing 11:00 p.m. here. And it will just keep on counting down, even after it passes the target date, i.e., after Monday it will start returning a negative number. Anyway, I think it's interesting. I find it difficult to explain, though, both the way these kinds of things work and the reason that I find them interesting. I try, though.

        One of my aunts was in town a couple of weeks ago, and I went out to visit with her. She was asking me about my new job and I was trying to describe what I was going to be doing, as much as I knew, in very basic terms. She interrupted me and said, "I don't understand what the Internet is. Can you explain it to me?" Well, at it's most basic, I guess it's a network of computers connected by phone lines and fiber optic cables. That satisfied her, and I was glad. It's much more than that, of course, but I didn't see any need of getting into a philosophical discussion of all the things that it means to me, and all the good things that have happened in my life since I became involved in it. She probably wouldn't have believed it, anyway.