Summer's end

Today's the last day of my little "summer" vacation from work. I didn't do much of anything except play computer games, which is fine in my book. I needed to get away from everything and everybody.

Yesterday was Julie's birthday, which we celebrated on Sunday with friends and family. It had been a while since we got to spend some time just hanging out with the crew. After dinner, it was time for martinis at nicer bar in town.

Today's agenda: start catching up on emails from work, do some bills, maybe work on my tenure folders. In other words, it is time to start gearing up to go back into the "work" part of my life again.

New elements

I got this from my friend Susan in email today, and I had to share:

Element Name: WOMANIUM
Symbol: WO
Atomic Weight: (Don't even go there)
Physical Properties: Generally soft and round in form. Boils at nothing and may freeze at any time. Melts when treated properly. Very Bitter if not used well.
Chemical Properties: Very active. Highly unstable. Possesses strong affinity with gold, silver, platinum and precious stones. Violent when left alone. Able to absorb great amounts of exotic food. Turns slightly green when placed next to a better specimen.
Usage: Highly ornamental. An extremely good catalyst for dispersion of wealth. Probably the most powerful income reducing agent known.
Caution: Highly explosive in inexperienced hands.

Element Name: MANIUM
Symbol: XY
Atomic Weight: (180 +/- 50)
Physical Properties: Solid at room temperature, but gets bent out of shape easily. Fairly dense and sometimes flaky. Difficult to find a pure sample. Due to rust, aging samples are unable to create electricity.
Chemical Properties: Attempts to bond with any WO any chance it can get. Also tends to form strong bonds with itself. Becomes explosive when mixed with KD (Element: CHILDIUM) for prolonged periods of time.
Neutralize by saturating with alcohol.
Usage: None known.
Caution: In the absence of WO, this element rapidly decomposes and begins to smell.

Ain't it the truth?

Way too long

I haven't written anything for a long time, and there's a reason. A few reasons actually, take your pick:

• I'm helping beta test a new basketball simulation game.
• I'm getting trying to catch up from a month full of computer security orientations. I talked to over 200 people who work in the library about the what they should and should not be doing both in regards to safe computing and the University policies regarding use.
• I promised my wife I'd be more available to her, instead of locking myself in the office in front of a computer screen all the time.
• Football season has started, so I'm watching more TV than before.
  
• I'm going up for tenure this year, so I have several deadlines to get things composed, correlated, and otherwise collected for all the various steps I have to go through.

So there you go. I'll try to elaborate more on all those points later, but right now it's time to get back to work. Ciao!

You're Siddhartha!

by Hermann Hesse

You simply don't know what to believe, but you're willing to try anything once. Western values, Eastern values, hedonism and minimalism, you've spent some time in every camp. But you still don't have any idea what camp you belong in. This makes you an individualist of the highest order, but also really lonely. It's time to chill out under a tree. And realize that at least you believe in ferries.


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