Sick Day -- 01/05/00
So, today I gave in to my cold and stayed home...
Got up at the usual time, fixed coffee, etc., got Nancy off to work. That part worked fine. Called in to work to leave a voice mail message saying I wouldn't be in, then decided to check my own voice mail. There was a message for me that had come in just after I had left yesterday, telling me that the classes I thought I had successfully registered for over the Internet were actually full and I would have to select either a different location or different dates. Rats. Then I made multiple attempts at getting my kids up and off to school. My daughter complained of being unable to sleep, of getting maybe ten hours sleep over the past three days, and did not know if she felt sick or not. I don't know if she has a cold (and she has inherited my sometimes painful sinuses) or is feeling stress over the college application process or whatever, but I put on shoes and drove my son to school (although by this time he was a few minutes late). When I got back home my daughter was still undecided about going to school. I went back to bed with the intention of taking a nap for an hour or so -- that was about eight-thirty and I didn't wake up until half past noon. Guess I really needed some sleep.
I phoned Rational Rose -- not a person, a software company, Rational Software, that makes a product called Rational Rose, a UML tool. They teach a course on UML and one on Rational Rose that I attempted to sign up for yesterday. The location I wanted is full so I have to either switch location (which means going to Virginia or California or Colorado or Toronto, etc.) or I have to switch dates (which may also require a shift in dates). This is getting complicated and I can't settle the issue at home, need to be at work (didn't bring my laptop home yesterday) to check schedules, etc. I may be getting involved in teaching some different courses and I need these courses so that I have the proper technical foundation. There is a good chance that I will be spending some time over the next couple of months in Toronto (one of my favorite cities, although I don't know that winter is the best time to be there) and might have to go to California and/or Arizona as part of this. Whatever.
Yesterday I wrote that I should think about joining a webring. (Oh, c'mon, you know what a webring is, right? Well, if you aren't familiar with the concept, www.webring.org will tell you about it and lead you to hundreds of different webrings (and some of them really are different). So I have signed up with Open Pages and have installed their html tag on my index page and am waiting for word from Kymm that I have been added. Open Pages is a webring of journals,; I think probably it's the largest. I can remember when I was amazed that their membership went from 200 to 300; my site id number will be 1285! I think I am going to also apply to join Speak Freely, a smaller webring of journals that are hosted on free sites (such as Geocities). Some journals are part of just one or two webrings, others seem to belong to several. Well, I'll just see how it goes. I mean, am I just sitting here typing for myself (yeah, partly) and for a handfull of people who visit once in a while, or would I like to communicate to a (slightly) larger audience?
I've known Open Pages for most of its existence. Until she tired of journaling and closed operations I was a steady reader of Kat's OzDiary and exchanged email with her from time to time -- Kat was the founder of Open Pages. I know that online journalers sometimes get together in Real Life, etc. and that people who know each other on the Internet sometimes arrange to meet in RL. I was in Honolulu on business in December of '98 and sent Kat an email to see if we could get together for coffee, but by the time she accessed her old email address and responded I was already back in Rhode Island. [I have met other online friends in RL, visited a family in the U.K. that I had gotten to know via posting on an online journal forum, and have talked with others by phone, but don't, in general, have any great urge to attend a Real Life convention.] Speak Freely was new to me. I'm not even sure exactly how I found it -- well, from someone's page who also belonged to Open Pages, but I can't recall which one. I did wander through the Speak Freely list and visited a few sites. One of them, Piper's Pages, had a forum question asking for visitors to list their webpage addresses, so I did. Hey, that could lead to one more hit, right? (Piper, by the way, is a college student, one of the one hundred eighty-seven million twenty year old college students who have webpages -- okay, so I exaggerate a little bit -- but I did like her site.)
I suppose I could be sharing deep thoughts about Y2K or something but despite having had a four hour nap, I am still feeling very tired and under-the-weather... so I think this is the end of today's entry.

**Sick Day** -- *01/05/00*
So, today I gave in to my cold and stayed home... Got up at the usual time, fixed coffee, etc., got Nancy off to work. That part worked fine. Called in to work to leave a voice mail message saying I wouldn't be in, then decided to check my own voice mail. There was a message for me that had come in just after I had left yesterday, telling me that the classes I thought I had successfully registered for over the Internet were actually full and I would have to select either a different location or different dates. Rats. Then I made multiple attempts at getting my kids up and off to school. My daughter complained of being unable to sleep, of getting maybe ten hours sleep over the past three days, and did not know if she felt sick or not. I don't know if she has a cold (and she has inherited my sometimes painful sinuses) or is feeling stress over the college application process or whatever, but I put on shoes and drove my son to school (although by this time he was a few minutes late). When I got back home my daughter was still undecided about going to school. I went back to bed with the intention of taking a nap for an hour or so -- that was about eight-thirty and I didn't wake up until half past noon. Guess I really needed some sleep. I phoned Rational Rose -- not a person, a software company, Rational Software, that makes a product called Rational Rose, a UML tool. They teach a course on UML and one on Rational Rose that I attempted to sign up for yesterday. The location I wanted is full so I have to either switch location (which means going to Virginia or California or Colorado or Toronto, etc.) or I have to switch dates (which may also require a shift in dates). This is getting complicated and I can't settle the issue at home, need to be at work (didn't bring my laptop home yesterday) to check schedules, etc. I may be getting involved in teaching some different courses and I need these courses so that I have the proper technical foundation. There is a good chance that I will be spending some time over the next couple of months in Toronto (one of my favorite cities, although I don't know that winter is the best time to be there) and might have to go to California and/or Arizona as part of this. Whatever. Yesterday I wrote that I should think about joining a webring. (Oh, c'mon, you know what a webring is, right? Well, if you aren't familiar with the concept, www.webring.org will tell you about it and lead you to hundreds of different webrings (and some of them really are different). So I have signed up with Open Pages and have installed their html tag on my index page and am waiting for word from Kymm that I have been added. Open Pages is a webring of journals,; I think probably it's the largest. I can remember when I was amazed that their membership went from 200 to 300; my site id number will be 1285! I think I am going to also apply to join Speak Freely, a smaller webring of journals that are hosted on free sites (such as Geocities). Some journals are part of just one or two webrings, others seem to belong to several. Well, I'll just see how it goes. I mean, am I just sitting here typing for myself (yeah, partly) and for a handfull of people who visit once in a while, or would I like to communicate to a (slightly) larger audience? I've known Open Pages for most of its existence. Until she tired of journaling and closed operations I was a steady reader of Kat's OzDiary and exchanged email with her from time to time -- Kat was the founder of Open Pages. I know that online journalers sometimes get together in Real Life, etc. and that people who know each other on the Internet sometimes arrange to meet in RL. I was in Honolulu on business in December of '98 and sent Kat an email to see if we could get together for coffee, but by the time she accessed her old email address and responded I was already back in Rhode Island. [I have met other online friends in RL, visited a family in the U.K. that I had gotten to know via posting on an online journal forum, and have talked with others by phone, but don't, in general, have any great urge to attend a Real Life convention.] Speak Freely was new to me. I'm not even sure exactly how I found it -- well, from someone's page who also belonged to Open Pages, but I can't recall which one. I did wander through the Speak Freely list and visited a few sites. One of them, Piper's Pages, had a forum question asking for visitors to list their webpage addresses, so I did. Hey, that could lead to one more hit, right? (Piper, by the way, is a college student, one of the one hundred eighty-seven million twenty year old college students who have webpages -- okay, so I exaggerate a little bit -- but I did like her site.) I suppose I could be sharing deep thoughts about Y2K or something but despite having had a four hour nap, I am still feeling very tired and under-the-weather... so I think this is the end of today's entry.

Tuesday Thoughts -- 01/04/00 (yesterday's entry)

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