See the entry below if you want an explanation. Or send me a check, and it’s all yours 😉

This entry and the one above it are mainly for Kevin and Marcia to check out, they’re thinking about buying this off of me. Of course, if you’re interested, the bidding starts at $60. It’s from Ikea and cost me somewhere north of $200 when I bought it a couple of years ago.

winamp 3 is something of a disaster, if you hadn’t noticed. It’s suffering from serious feature creep and become buggy, bloated and sluggish. I’d been looking around for something better and stumbled across QCD. It’s main advantage over winamp 2 is that it can do variable shaped skins, ie the user interface doesn’t have to be a rectangle of a particular size, so you can get a tiny unobtrusive skin for it that allows you to tuck it away in a corner of the screen. Give it a try, I’ve found it to be superior to winamp.

Windows only mind you.

Fuck.

Not two minutes after the last post, we get summoned to an emergency all staff meeting. Looks like subsequent job cuts are aimed directly at my department. The outcome of this is unknown right now, it’s all brand new information. It’s clear they intend to cut jobs out of my department though. Whether that means me remains to be seen. More as I learn of it.

At the slight risk of jinxing it, I will note that yesterday was d-day on Bowdoin’s campus. A number of people were laid off and apparantly I am not to be one of them. It seems like we were very fortunate as well, since out of the original 20-30 positions quoted as being the target number, most were handled with early retirement and voluntary staff reductions. As far as we can tell, only about 10-12 people actually lost their jobs. That’s still awful for them with the economy the way it is, but it’s only 1/3 of the worst-case scenario that was being described a month ago.

I seem to be the only person I know who is actually wishing the cold weather would come back. The recent warm spell has led to the onset of mud season, my least favorite part of the year. I can’t stand slogging through slush, not to mention trying to heave 30-40 pound shovel fulls of sludge off my driveway. Bring back the sub zero temperatures and the light fluffy snow I say, I prefer cold but dry toes to soggy damp shriveled cold toes any day. (and it does look like by the end of the week the cold will be back. Bring it on!)

Those of you who know me well know I’m a bit of a…space cadet. My short term memory is poor at best. I’ve chalked this up to the ahem fun I had when I was younger, in my crazed days. Well, recent research seems to suggest that actually it’s all tied into the blood sugar problems I had been having. Meaning I’m going to be the only one out of all of you to get smarter as I get older and I get my blood sugars under control.

Andrew turned me onto this one. More arcade games than you can shake a stick at, all playable in your browser. Great ‘I need a 5 minute break from work’ website. Don’t be put off by the website’s spartan appearance. It’s all about the content.

In the event anyone’s interested, I have:

more ebay auctions

up and running. 3 Playstation 2 games and another playstation game that turned into a collector’s item. I like getting back more than I paid for them 😉

Ebay is a great way to feed my gaming habit too, I have to say. I usually end up recouping about 80% of the purchase price for the games I get, and occasionally I even get more back than I paid for them. It’s like having a games rental service. It takes a little more work on my end but hey, anything to help offset the cost.

The money from these is going to go towards a Nintendo Gamecube so I can play the new Zelda game that’s coming out. Nintendo is having a deal starting next week where if you buy a Gamecube you get a free game with it, and you can choose from several of their best games. I’m probably going to go for Metroid though I might go for Starfox instead. Plus I have the new Zelda game pre-ordered, and Kevin owes me $50 which is going to go towards the Gamecube mario game. Have I mentioned I’m a games addict recently? 😉

Ever seen one of those ‘powers of 10’ demos where they start from earth orbit and zoom down to a couple at a picnic? Check out this one for an even grander sense of scale. Mind, you need a web browser with Java to see it. Tres cool.