I’m actually at work today. There are very few people here today. I have no meetings today. Well, OK, there was one about half an hour ago, but only two (including me) of the usual six people were there and it took about 30 seconds. I have some email to catch up on, and I’ll do that. And I”m sure I could figure out some other things to work on. I’ll try. But it is a SLOW day. It will probably be a slow week. But for now, it is time for lunch…. uh, if the cafeteria is open. I guess I’ll go check.

Edit: Nope, no cafeteria, although the little coffee thing is open. I got some donuts from there earlier when I first got to work. For lunch, I’m having chips from the vending machine. Woo!

I was just scanning my stats for the first time in awhile and noticed that in terms of visits referred, all of a sudden it isn’t all search engines and the occasional website of someone I know or one of the handful of blogs that have linked to me over the years. No, all of a sudden there is something new. Wikipedia is in the list. All of a sudden the #4 source of visits to my site (behind images.google.com, google.com and search.msn.com) is en.wikipedia.org. That is of course the English Wikipedia site. Lower on the list are the German Wikipedia, the French Wikipedia and the Italian Wikipedia.

What the hell? In any case, looks like a few weeks ago someone added a few links to my site (specifically this page) on a few different Wikipedia pages where it is sort of semi-relevant.

Who knows if it will last, but still kinda cool.

And it wasn’t me who did it… really! :-)

There are several things worth noting from the last week or so that I haven’t posted about yet, so here is a quick post with a few notes on those things:

• The visit from my mother, just under four days, was good. We didn’t *do* a huge amount. We basically hung out for a few days. We went to one of Amy’s choral performances. We played a board game my mom brought. We sat around at home and played with the dog. We went out for meals a few times. Unfortunately Brandy had a cold through most of the visit, and I was still recovering from my own maladies (still am) but we managed to have a good time anyway. There are pictures, but they are in my email, so I haven’t done anything with them yet.
• As soon as my mom left, Amy caught whatever Brandy had over the weekend and missed a couple of days of school. She insisted on trying to go to school today, but is probably still on the edge, so we’ll see how that goes. Meanwhile, neither Brandy nor I are 100% either.
• Earlier this week my sister Cynthia shared the news that she officially got word that she had been accepted by her first choice college, the one she had done the early application thing for. That would be Oberlin. She should be starting there in the fall. Congratulations to Cynthia. I know she is more than ready to start. For now though I imagine it is all about fighting Senioritis.
• While my mom was here we got a tree up and decorated it and all that kind of thing. Roscoe proceeded to knock it down the next day. We put it up again, but in a new spot which would be harder to knock down.
• Amy’s hand is still in a brace thing after she hurt it chasing a boy at school more than a month ago. But we got word last week from the doctors that it looks like she needs physical therapy rather than surgery, which is a good thing since we’d been told earlier that might have been a possibility. I imagine she’ll start having to go to the therapist after New Year’s. She had recovered enough to play her bass again a few weeks ago, but then went into the Doctor for more tests and they reinjured something in the process, and so she’s once again not able to play, which frustrates her. But hopefully she will be able to again soon.
• The mail issue continues, but not because I don’t know how to fix it, but because lately when I get home I’ve just wanted to lie down so I haven’t done anything very productive at home in weeks it seems. I need to get that mail stuff done soon though.
• Um, that’s it for now.

By the way, for those who haven’t listened to the podcast this week yet, over the weekend I had an email meltdown. This is a client side meltdown this time rather than a server side one. And I don’t THINK I have lost anything based on the copies I have in a few different places. I hope. But I can’t get to my mail the normal way at the moment because my client is very confused, and I can’t get to my long term email archive at all at the moment. (The long term archive is ONLY on my local machine, not on the network.) I can get to my current mail and my short term archive (which are on the network) using alternate clients on other machines, or via the web. But I am not doing so actively or regularly until I fix my local client. So if you really need to get ahold of me for something in the short term, you’re better off calling me.

Anyway, at this point I’ve tried the two or three simplest default ways of getting mail.app unconfused, and they have not worked. So after having completely backed up my mail folder, I’m off to go try more drastic things. I’m still pretty upbeat about this at this point, because I don’t think anything is actually lost. However, if over the next day or so I start discovering that I am wrong about that and part of my long term email archive actually is lost, I will get very very upset.