(Title is a reference to one of William’s current favorite books - Zoom City would have to be up there too…)

Anyway…Things have been fairly hectic at work lately. They just hired a couple of new people in the department - one of which is in my area. He’s been here since last week, so I’ve spent a fair amount of time working with him, showing him some of the ropes. It’s a nice refresher on some of the interesting/complicated stuff that we’ve done here, that I maybe just take my knowledge of for granted. On the other hand, it means that some of my other work gets pushed back a bit, and with Sarbanes Oxley deadlines looming, that’s not a good thing. It’s all fallout from the Enron/Worldcom fiascos, but it strikes me as a little funny. It’s not like there was some nameless programmer who perpetrated those heinous crimes, but ultimately, it’s the nameless programmers, accountants etc. that are going to wind up with a lot of upheaval in their lives.

Don’t get me wrong, most of the Sarbanes Oxley stuff makes a lot of sense, and it’s giving us a chance to get some controls in place that we otherwise wouldn’t have had time for. On the other hand, I’ve spent a lot of time working on projects that won’t ultimately add to the bottom line of the company — they’ll just help prevent the CEO from going to jail. That’s a good thing too, I guess.

I had a bit of a computer disaster at home - I plugged in a computer, and the power supply went into overdrive, and burned itself out. I’m hoping that none of the components got affected (and I don’t think they were) but for the time being, I can’t really test it out. It was a really old machine, so it’s not a big deal (I think I could replace it for around $20 if the HD/optical drives are ok) but it leaves me without a desktop machine until after we move, when I was planning on replacing it anyway. I guess that’s less than three weeks now, so I should be able to survive :) It was a pretty strange thing though - I don’t think I’ve ever seen a machine do that before. The keyboard lights were blinking like crazy, and the DVD burner ejected the tray halfway before the power supply toasted itself completely. It took less than 10 seconds in total.

So that’s the news from here.

Simpson’s quote of the day: “Whoa-ho! A talking dog! What were you guys smokin’ when you came up with that?” - Otto