The rest of the interesting stuff has already been covered. Here are the stats for today:
| Sleep | Water | Exercise | Coffee | Alcohol |
| 08:00 h | 1.470 L | 18:12 min | 1 1/2 cup(s) | 2 drink(s) |
Two glasses of wine since it’s Friday, not enough water, I sped up a bit on my 2 miles, and I made a second half-pot of half-caff in the afternoon. Now it’s time for bed.
I love wikis. I love the idea. I love many of the implementations. We use one in my research lab, I use one for my home page, I set a few up for coordination following Hurricane Katrina, and so on. The internal lab wiki has saved me hours and countless hours of having to re-explain something. It’s saved Rob from having to set up some other sort of distribution of software. Now that I’m using access control lists, it provides and easy way for the lab to make files and information readily available to select people, and to the world. It’s a fantastic collaboration tool, whose power is perhaps epitomized by the king of wikis, Wikipedia. Last week, I decided that there was a nice big hole in the Internets where something should be.
A wiki for the entire field of cardiac electrophysiology. And here it is:
It’s in its infancy now, but I intend to populate it further. It will truly take off when enough people watch it, update it, point their students at it, make it their homepage, tell their friends, post conference notes, list blogs, share research data, and use it to keep abreast of the field.
The age of person-generated content is at hand. (As opposed to organization-generated content, I suppose)
Whither the Fed-Ex truck? Or perhaps, just my package. It was supposed to be delivered yesterday, and was not. They left a door tag even though I was home. The buzzer on our apartment doesn’t work, and I haven’t had packages delievered here before, so this is all new to me. I called the number on the door tag, on which was written “COME PICK UP” and was summarily told that I could not in fact pick the package up from its storage place — it’s not accessible to the public. They supposedly don’t even have an outside line. That’s ludicrous — I’m sure it’s just not listed. The friendly gentleman on the phone informed me that they’d try again tomorrow (which is now today).
I decided to wait at home today for the package. I made arrangements. I put out a sign and propped the door. When five-o’-clock rolled around, I drank some half-caff coffee out on the stoop and listened to a podcast, watching for the white truck to roll down the street. Alas, there was none. I came back in around six and called FedEx.
“Sure I can check for you, can you hold?….” five minutes pass, I’m thinking this is a long time to call and check where my package is, “Hello sir? Yes, well, they don’t know why it was never loaded on the truck today… sure, yes you can come pick it up, please hold.” Another four minutes or so, then, “What’s your phone number. Okay, they’ll call you when it’s ready and at the front desk. Goodbye.”
I don’t want to sit around and wait until possibly eight pee-em, when they could finally decide to call me. There was wine in the fridge with my name on it. I called and asked if I could pick it up Monday. No problem. They connected me with the location so that they could give me directions. “Where are you located? U City? We’re right by there.” (gives streets) “They’re back there looking right now. It’s a small package, only one pound. I’m sure it’s right under their noses. Okay, we’ll see you Monday.”
So, FedEx lost my package? Hopefully they will find it by Monday. UPS delivered some packages for me yesterday without event. The downstairs neighbors had warned me that FedEx could be difficult around here. I tried to avoid them, but had no choice on this particular order. This has not bolstered my confidence in FedEx. It sounds like they’ve got a bum driver/distribution center gumming up the works.
Bah.
I have more to say, but it deserves its own post.
Today I’ll start with the stats:
| Sleep | Water | Exercise | Coffee | Alcohol |
| 07:00 h | 1.269 L | 18:16 min | 1/2 cup(s) | 1 drink(s) |
I opened a new bottle of wine today, a Columbia Crest Two Vines cab. It’s not bad. Maybe even good! I haven’t had a cab in a while, but I think this one came off of my recommended list. Speaking of wines, I left a bunch of comments over on this post on gapingvoid. Hugh’s looking for new and interesting wine label designs. The prize is US$2000, so it’d be awful nice if my ideas were used.
I also received some accessories for my Treo 600 today. They are a holster, a folding keyboard, and a self-reeling charge-and-sync cable. My dive slate didn’t get here today because fedex didn’t know I was home.
Veery tired. I did some good work today, really tied up a lot of stuff that’s been dangling loose at work. Today is the first day that I was able to leave work after logging six worked hours. For the past week, something has always come up in the afternoon that prevented me from leaving when the time was up. Today, I came home, and it was nice. Admittedly, I was a big antsy wondering why none of my packages had come yet, and after eating dinner I became a bit sluggish, but in the end I still accomplished some things once I got here.
Now it’s bedtime. Oh, and I drank enough water today.
I finally found a command line to convert video for the ipod. It looks alright, but I haven’t actually tried loading the video onto the ipod yet. I found it here.
$ ffmpeg -i foo.avi -b 600 -s 320x240 -vcodec mpeg4 -ab 128 -acodec aac foo.mp4