Tuesday, February 17, 2004

So Happy!

Yippee! My job just got a little more fun…well, maybe not fun, but a little easier on the old hands. Since I’ve started here January, my keyboard has been a basic, no frills, pile of junk. The keys weren’t the most sensitive so I’d often have to pound out the keystrokes when typing, which kind of sucked for my fingers, but it’s not that big of a deal (and I don’t want to seem like that much of a typing weenie). When writing a lot of text, it does get a little bit annoying because I’ll often miss keystrokes from not hitting the keyboard hard enough which is a pain because it takes me out of my rhythm. I know it sounds dumb, but it’s true.

Over the last couple of days we’ve also been going through all of the hardware in the office since we’re going to get upgrades eventually, and putting together all the spare parts and old components that aren’t used so that they can get transported back down to the Clear Lake office where they’ll get rid of it all. While going through a bunch of the junk in the server room we came across a brand new, still shrink-wrapped and in the box, Microsoft Elite keyboard--professional edition. I told Tom that I’d kill to be able to use it for my computer. He told me to take it since it’s probably just been sitting in the server room for a while anyways.

Oh, it’s so heavenly. I have a MS Elite keyboard at home that I love so it’s nice to have one at work too. I simply adore the ergonomic layout of the keys. Also, this one has all the hotkeys for controlling winamp and surfing the web, which I will make heavy use out of. There’s also two USB ports in the keyboard so when I finally get a new computer here at work, I’m just going to hook my palm pilot up here and synch it because I really don’t use it for personal use anymore. Anyhow, I’m just really stoked that I get a brand spanking new keyboard that frickin’ rocks to use here at work.

I know it may seem very odd that just yesterday I was on a rampage about how Microsoft sucks and today I am happy because I get one of their products. In reality, they do make good hardware. I love their keyboards. Their mice are pretty good. The Xbox is unbelievably sweet. Their wireless networking hardware has worked great for me. The only real problem I have with them is their software. It always seems broken or it doesn’t work like it should. I wish that their software would start to work as well as their hardware. If it did, wow, we’d have one heck of a company on our hands.

Ok, now that I’ve gotten my nerdage out of my system today (and yesterday too), I can take a chance to talk about valentine’s day. I know, usually this would entail me ranting about how it is such a gender specific, manufactured holiday that goes against everything that I believe in. I still hold those beliefs, but you’re not going to get to hear about them this year.

For valentine’s day weekend I went up to St. Cloud to visit Kristin. I got there Saturday afternoon. We hung out at her place for a while. I gave her her v-day gifts, which happened to be a big poster of Legolas from LOTR and a home-made cd lamp. I wish I had a picture of it to show you, but I don’t. Basically, what I did was take a big stack of cds, drill the hold a little bigger, put a neon light down the middle, make a top and a bottom out of wood, and put four dowels around the discs to hold them in place and to hold the top and bottom to each other. It looks kinda like the warp core from the Enterprise, but not nearly as cool. My dad and I put it together and it didn’t turn out half bad. I have more parts for making one for me now, but I still have so much clutter in my room as it is that I’ll probably wait to finish for a while.

Kristin gave me a few really cute things for v-day. She got me a bag of kit kats (which I ate over the weekend—I have no willpower), a big cookie, a little St. Ben’s bear, and a sweet silver ring for my thumb. It’s got really neat tribal designs on it that I love. She also colored me a picture that was really cute of Lilo & Stitch. I was quite happy! Later we went over to one of Kristin’s friend’s houses for dinner. We ended up staying there the entire night since we fell asleep on the floor at about 3 am. We slept in pretty late, had some breakfast, played some cards, watched some Smallville, and then I had to go home and she had to go to work. It wasn’t the most exciting v-day ever, but somehow it still seemed perfect.

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