I just discovered that i allowed my free plane ticket, acquired by giving up my seat on an overbooked flight, expire. I’m really bummed about this, since I had about a dozen places in mind to go with it, and never got around to it. This sucks, tremendously.

The following is intended as a public service announcement only. I am not looking for comments, condolances or wisecracks. However, large cash gifts are always appropriate. This is intended primarily for my remote friends – that is, those folks with whom I am not in frequent enough contact, or who don’t live close enough, that they would already know this. In other words, this is intended to prevent awkward moments at parties, conferences, and on IRC.

As of last Friday, according to the court of the state of Kentucky, I am no longer married.

Further discussion of related issues will have to wait for another time, since it’s a little hard to be objective. Or, to quote Stevie Nicks (which, of course, I try to do as often as possible) “It’s hard to be civil, and it’s real hard to be nice.”

Yesterday on the way home, I drove behind a car with a license plate “500 ERR”, and wondered if it was intentional.

Which reminded me of something I saw a few weeks ago, and even took a picture of, because it amused me. But I suspect that only Ken, and perhaps other regular residents of #apache, will see the humor in it.

Note, it’s a pretty bad picture, and it may be a little hard to even pick out what I was taking the picture of, let alone why it’s funny.

OK, last one for tonight.

So I mentioned that the telemarketers were calling me repeatedly. And I have a policy of not answering the phone if I don’t recognize the number. If they really need to talk to me, they’ll leave a message, and maybe I’ll pick up.

But I finally answered one of the “no caller id” calls, just to see.

It was a long-distance company, calling to confirm my request to change to their service. They asked for various personal details. I said, huh? They said, please confirm your mailing address, so that we can finalize your order.

I finally got her to stop and explain to me what she was calling about, at which point I was able to persuade her that, no, I did not request that they take over my long distance service, and that, no, I was not going to provide them with all sorts of personal details, and could they please please please stop calling me.

The “no caller id” calls have stopped. It’s been very nice.

I experienced the events of Sept 11, 2001, entirely via IRC. Later in the morning, when CNN.com came back up, I got the little bit of news, as it trickled in, from that site, and also from Boston.com.

So that morning was even more surreal than it might have been had I seen footage on television, or heard it on the radio. I saw digital photos from people living in Manhattan. I saw pictures from a webcam pointing at the Pentagon. I watched as people described what they were hearing and seeing on the news, and discussed various theories of what was going on.

After the second plane hit the trade towers, discussion changed pretty fast. It was clear that it was not an accident. Although, for a while, a number of people disputed the report of the second plane, saying that people were confused, and hearing the first report again.

There was the report of a car bomb at the Smithsonian. Or perhaps it was a the White House. Or at the State Department. And there was clearly something buring at the Pentagon, but nobody knew what that was about.

Then the towers fell. This was monumentally hard to believe. Surely this was not being reported accurately. But then there were photos. Loading painfully slowly, but there were the pictures. It was gone. And then the other one was gone.

Meanwhile, we had work to do. We had a deadline. Ken was sitting numbly, unable to work. I was trying to work, but could not. What could it possibly matter that this customer get their insignificant web site done?

Later in the day, the customer had the nerve to say that they believed that the events of the day would help their cause (political action bloodsuckers), and I almost hung up on them. This was the moment when I started passionately hating this customer, and the main reason that I was not sorry when they dropped their contract.

I’m currently trying to track down someone that has a transcript of #perl (rhizomatic.net) from that morning, since I appear to have lost mine.

On Saturday, we painted a HUGE map of the USA on Sarah’s school parking lot. Kentucky was about 2.5 feet across, to give you some idea of the scale.

Most folks ignored the instructions to start in the middle and work out, so by the end, I was playing twister to paint Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana. And I got lots of paint on me due to certain people insisting on painting south Texas before north Texas.

So, today, I hurt all over. For some reason, I didn’t suffer much yesterday, but today my legs and back hurt, and my shoulders are so tight you could bounce a paint can off of them. But the map looks absolutely wonderful, so I suppose it was worth it.

Over the last 48 hours, I have received about 50 calls from UNKNOWN CALLER. Since I make a firm practice of not answering these calls (I *despise* talking to telemarketers, primarily because I don’t know how to say “No” to them, and because they waste huge amounts of time getting to the point, and invariably call when I’m doing something important) I let the answering machine get it. None of them have left a message, leading me to believe that the choice not to answer was the right one. Still, it’s annoying. What’s most annoying about it is how late in the evening they are calling. I kinda think that 7pm, maybe 8, is about the latest any decent marker should be calling. Many of these have been after 8, some as late as 9:30. That’s just not right.

I just spent the last 3 hours balancing my checkbook. Why did it take so long? Well, because I had not done it since May. Why not? Well, I suppose it was a combination of lack of time and terror of finding out that I was one paycheck away from being on the street.

I do not recommend this as a standard financial practice. It’s better to know. Although there were some times that I think if I knew how close I was, I’d have been under even more stress than I was.

Amazingly, everything came out just fine, and everything was balanced and accounted for.

I meant to mention – I checked out the old Warner Bros LotR movie from the public library and watched it earlier this week. It was truly dreadful. The animation was terrible. The story telling was terrible. Everything was terrible. I’m amazed that they bothered to make a DVD of it. I’d have thought that they would rather the entire embarrassing thing be forgotten forever.

It was animated, but apparently they had taken live footage and animated on top of it for some of the scenes. This did not work particularly well.

It’s hard to express how utterly terrible it was. Just awful. Think bad saturday morning cartoons, but without the relief of cereal commercials.

I’m trying to teach my daughter that humor tends not to enjoy an economy of scale. Which is to say that a funny line from a movie will tend not to be funny the 112th time it is repeated in any given 5 minute period.