At the last band practice, I started audibly singing. This is very unusual for me, to be able to hear myself sing and play at the same time. It was precipitated by two things: 1) I insisted that we rehearse vocal parts in the harsh light of the capella style, no instruments playing. 2) Brian swapped mics with me, since I'm using a really old one and he's really loud. It worked out pretty well, I'm taking on more parts, more stuff to do at once. I tried beat-boxing and playing the guitar in time, but it takes a lot of concentration to do all that stuff at the same time, and if you start drooling, you've got no free hands to cover your mouth. So I had to actually learn the lyrics to some of our songs! The songs I've been playing for 6 years! Even now, I only know the lines that I come in on. My mental score to our latest goes something like:

hmmm hmmm hmm hmmmm huh hmmm hm hmmm
blood baptism by skies divided!
hmm huh hmm hmmmm hmm hmm,
sometimes I wish I was only dreaming!
...dum dee dum dee something something hmm hmm hmm

I've now got a T-1 to my house. Getting a cisco router has been proving problematic, running into at least one mixup and delay in the purchasing department. What modern piece of gear do I have plugged into the smartjack right now? A loopback plug. Yaaaayy! Resistors!

I've been helping a development group somewhere in the mideast or east part of the US (locations don't matter to me, I work from home. one aspect of location actually does matter, though...) and 10:30 is a good time for them to meet. Fine, right? Well, 10:30 there is 8:30 am here. Ugh, so I wake up early to immediately teleconference about software development. Good thing: I can do it in my underpants. Bad thing: I'm barely able to dial phone numbers this early in the morning. Sometimes during teleconferences there are long pauses after I finish saying something. It makes me think that everyone else is sitting there, holding the phone receiver out in front of them and wondering what the hell I was just going on about. Actually, they're just waiting to see if I'm really done talking.

My network spontaneously stopped working for about half an hour. After 10 minutes of frenzied diagnostics, the remote gateway decided to route the internet once more and everything was fine. I'll just say I'm glad I got the T-1 sitting there. I also have a good-performance web server mirroring my current one, ready for the day when I change to T-1, take control of my own name service, and swap nerve out of active duty.

When I first made that People I Know page, I didn't really know many of those people very well, so the descriptions were very terse and somewhat dumb. Now it's a little more verbose, and I managed to put some of my immediate family on it. It's a lot of work digging up photos of people, though, I hope I get more time to work on it soon.

Things that made me feel happy today: I got a card from Javina in the mail, when I was expecting only bills. Not just a "happy birthday signed me" kind of card either, the good kind with lots of writing. I think it's time to read it again!

mmm hmm something something duh duh dumm duh
out in the darkness I can hear destiny calling
me