big smile for the day

via my friend matt's livejournal, a story on DIY adjustable glasses. the idea is to help all the people without access to opticians and corrective lenses. can you imagine having to retire when your vision started changing due to age? or even not being able to read at all because your vision was never so great?

at $1 per pair... i, for one, would happily put in $30 or so to get a pair, for pure glee at seeing how they work. (and, well, with no more vision insurance, $30 would be a steal for a spare pair of glasses.) wonder if one laptop per child's give one get one idea for capitalizing on the neat-o factor could be used to help raise funds... give twenty-nine, get one?

for the grammar geeks

all of you are reading the nytimes blog after deadline, right?

back in college, one of my pastimes was marking up the student newspaper on the friday afternoon after it came out. just for fun, more than out of any desire to help or criticize; it was a relaxing activity like working a crossword. the oracle of that era was an easy target... during the 2000 election controversy, they had a headline about "flordia."

it tickles me, though, that somebody gets to do that for the new york times--the publication that frequently served as our paragon of style and good editing when putting together honors program publications. and gets to count it at as part of his job. that rocks.

quick admin note

i suspended the loudtwitter service for now. i put a gadget (complete with annoying ads!) in the sidebar here in case anyone not on twitter was all that interested... but, um, there seems to be a lot of overlap between the people who follow twitter feeds and the people who follow blogs, so i thought i'd quit repeating myself.

monday morning

cold, so cold. and three buses in a row were headed to newport news this morning, none to norfolk. (we're pretty sure the 8:15 was a newbie bus driver going the wrong way.) so i was an hour late to work, but not all that upset over the prospect of skipping going out for lunch to make up the time. staying inside is good. second cup of coffee, and my fingers are almost thawed.

i don't want to move to florida. but some days it doesn't sound so bad. (and a lot can happen in the years it's likely to take to get the carrier up to snuff and to make mayport carrier-ready, anyway...) they were planning to take the boat to norfolk today for the first time, but the newspaper says they're putting it off. not sure what that means for when/whether i get to see jesse before i leave for tennessee. it's strange how quickly it's gone from being normal to see each other every four to six weeks to having two weeks apart seem like a horribly long time.

speaking of which... madcap adventures to come! i'm flying to my parents' the 24th, driving to crossville the 27th for nicci's wedding, on to asheville the 28th for lindy focus, back to cookeville on new year's day to catch some of the reunion, then back to the parents' and flying home in time for work on monday. honestly, i'm a little exhausted thinking about it, but it'll be so much fun once the momentum gets going... once i figure out just how exactly to pack for all of it and how to get myself to the airport...

mumbles and factoids

• 09:09 migraine yesterday = i went to bed after work. now bouncing around on 11 hours of sleep!

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mumbles and factoids

• 14:28 investigating and eliminating potential duplicates in the database = not so entertaining. but it needs to be done.

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mumbles and factoids

• 11:08 making sure all our employment resources are up-to-date... the newspaper's sending people our way!

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