My Happy Life

(This entry is part of the Alamo Downtown Blog-a-thon.)

I won't say that I found true love at the Alamo Drafthouse. But I'm pretty sure it helped seal the deal.

I met my wife-to-be in March 2003—not at the Alamo Drafthouse, but at Opal Divine's. I decided, in a rare fit of boldness, to drop in on a gathering of online journal writers. I didn't know anything about online journaling back then. I was more into the blogging thing. There was, however, a growing movement in Austin to bridge the divides among the various sorts of online writers. I thought I'd check it out.

I just read that the Austin Humane Society lost their AC system two days ago and things are really heating up in there. I feel badly for the pets (and the workers) at that facility.

We adoped our little buddy Rufus from the Humane Society shelter. It was a good experience, other than feeling sad that there were so many pets needing a home, and we couldn't adopt 20 kitties. We're glad that they were nice to Rufus until we could come along to find him.

The Humane Society needs a new AC system and commercial HVAC systems are awfully expensive. There have been problems with the system at the city's public access television facility and I've been learning what's involved in fixing that. So I can totally believe that the Humane Society will need to raise as much as $300,000 to solve this.

I can't adopt 20 kitties, but I can afford a small donation. It sounds like right now that's the most critical need. It's easy to donate online.

I've been telling Jette for many weeks that I'd help her run the Holidailies web site this year, but there is no bloody way I'm signing up to post.

I just started a new contract a month ago. I also started a new access television show. I'm on overload right now, and have so much more I could be doing. I don't need to be signing up for a month of blogging.

A year ago things were different. I had finished up one contract and didn't expect even to begin looking for a new one until the new year. I was involved in a number of interesting projects that seemed worth blogging about. I was in a good place to take the Holidailies challenge.

Yet, somehow earlier today, when I was fiddling in the database, an urge took hold of me to flip the is_participant bit next to my name from 0 to a 1. So, here I am.

Yes, I know that all sounds very lame. Now that I look back, my rationale for joining last year was pretty lame too.

It's Holidailies time again. Holidailies is a community writing project for online journalers and other web writers. Participants aim for writing an article a day through the entire month of December.

The project, now in its seventh year, was founded by my wife. I've been assisting for the past four. I developed the portal that allows people to register and post their daily entries.

This year I got lazy and just reused last year's code without much change. That explains why this year, for the first time since I've been involved, we're actually starting the project on December 1 instead of partway through the month.

Last year I signed up as a participant. I finished the month with 23 entries posted.

This year, I probably won't. At this time last year I had wrapped up one contract and didn't expect to begin looking for a new one until after the new year. So a daily writing project seemed like an interesting project to try. This year, I fear I can't realistically commit to that.

But just because I'm being a total wimp doesn't mean that you have to. If you want to participate in Holidailies, you can. It's totally free. You just need to sign up. Just be warned that every year past we've had to cut off registrations early, so as not to overload our readers panel. I have no reason to expect this year will be any different.

If you do sign up, also consider becoming a sponsor. It's a great way to publicize your personal or small business site. Or, if you are associated with a non-profit group or organization, and would like some free public service advertising, drop me a line. We have a small number of "comp" slots set aside for non-profits that might be of interest to Holidailies participants.

Tomorrow is the two month anniversary of my marriage. In early discussions, my then-fiancee and I considered two places for the ceremony: Chez Zee and Green Pastures. Somehow along the way Green Pastures fell from consideration and we went with Chez Zee. It was totally wonderful, but now I wonder if cake 214 might be one reason why my now-wife nudged us in that direction.

(via Jim Parkhurst on the ALG mailing list)

It was 11:00pm and we had 30 wedding invitations to put in the mail. No problem, the Post Office has been advertising the heck out of their 24-hour, automated stations.

The girlfriend and I drove to the Northcross location. There was an "our of order" sign on the stamp machine. It was visible from the front door, and as I walked closer I could see all the angry graffiti scrawled on it.

Right next to the stamp machine the automated postal machine was flashing its own out of order message on the display. "Cannot dispense stamps," it said.

Thinking the outage was a fluke (and wanting the task complete), we decided to drive over to the Far West station. There, things were even worse.

The stamp machine in that office not only had an "out of order" sign on it, but all product had been removed from the display window. The message on this automated machine said it was down for nightly maintenance, with no indication whether it would take five minutes or five hours to complete.

We could have tried driving up to Balcones Woods or Braker Lane, but by this point the USPS message was clear: we're incompetent, don't rely on us.

And the moral of the story is that crappy service will sabotage your marketing campaign. Maybe the USPS should shift some of their marketing spending to operations and maintenance.

My birthday was last week. It was great. Lookey what I got:

I wrote earlier about thinking of parting with my beloved record album collection. Here is an update: it's gone. All 156 of them.

I thought about picking out a few to keep, but talked myself out of it. I feared that if I started picking out cherished pieces, I'd start with just one or two but end up keeping a big stack of them. Also, the fact of the matter is that they sat in boxes for over a decade. Whatever I kept would probably sit hidden away in storage, never to be used. So I boxed them all up, ready to go.

My vinyl LPs—all 156 of them—were packed for over a decade. I unpacked them last year, when I moved in with my girlfriend. I had grand plans of setting up the turntable and ripping all my albums to digital files.

Ha! That was wishful thinking. I've come to realize that's just not going to happen.

My mother, Gail Minsky, died suddenly last week, vicitim of an automobile accident. A memorial web site has been setup by the family.