Did it take long enough to get my computers and furniture back to pre-moving levels of functionality? I'm thinking it might have. I mean, starting on Feb 25 or so and ending maybe yesterday, all my productivity are belong to /dev/null. Finally, the world of DNS and name registration becomes visible to me, and I de-fuck MOST of my domain name stuff. Finally, Anthro sends me hyper-clamps to replace the ones that got slightly cracked when I dropped the entire 300 pound console desk onto the side of its support poles. (Anthro actually sent them to me March 4th, but UPS managed to not deliver them, reporting that I did not exist. They screwed it up again the second time Anthro delivered, too. Never use UPS for anything important. Ever. Fedex.)

Then I had all these backdated entries with crazy design ideas I wanted to post, but it seemed important to just start outputting without regard to quality or preparation. Otherwise, I would waffle forever, as just one more day of postponement succumbs again and again to the desire to fix one tiny detail. So I'm writing ill-conceived music, writing badly-designed sound drivers, and posting crappily-presented web pages. All in the name of getting started, praise be to that.

I did a few things for the first time this month: Baked a cake (for no good reason), bought wood from a lumber retailer and made it into shelves, and installed precision heatsinks using thermal compound. The lessons learned were many, and ranged from regretfully stupid to sublimely stupid. These included:

Cakes are not flat on top after baking.

It's very hard to draw a regular hexagon with the wide frosting nozzle

a single tiny blob of Arctic Silver 3 can make hundreds of surfaces, objects, and body parts sticky and greenish-silver if you don't watch it

3M "Dual Lock" velcro sticks to itself better than it initially sticks to wood

Whisking cake batter for 60 seconds makes my arm hurt

Volvo license plate bolts are a) not just cap nuts and b) metric

nailing 2 cm nails into the 3-way corner of two walls and the ceiling while standing one-footed on a barstool is not as easy as it sounds.

There were more things, but I'm pretty sure everyone else already knew them. So I got caught up a little. That's pretty much what it seems like I'm doing any time I learn something. Oh wait, there was one exception: last week brett sent me a message which said "DUDE DID YOU KNOW THAT YOU CAN DEFINE AND INSTANTIATE A CLASS IN JAVA WITHOUT GIVING IT A NAME?!?!?!" and I already knew that. It figured that it would be something practically useless that I would know before someone else.

All my appliances are black! The fridge, even! The fridge had a general electric case badge on it. It doesn't anymore!

Kris has to move now, too, since Ed was forced to move back to the Illicon Valley. I was just going to throw out a lot of stuff, like utensils I don't like anymore, but now I can hand them off to Kris! I feel a lot better about getting rid of stuff if it's going to someone that needs it. I just never want to do the searching for the needy. I'm glad someone will benefit from my large surplus of scrubby sponges and wastebaskets.

You need any Q-tips? I got Q-tips coming out of my ears! -- Helen, inadvertently

copyright andrew. PRETEND ANDREW EMAILED THIS TO YOU AND EMAIL HIM