DanRochman.com

I’ve got an announcement to make. I gave up caffeine ten weeks ago. There, I said it. I waited a while because I wanted to make sure I was actually going to stay with it for some decent length of time before going public. I still drink coffee, but now I reach for the (metaphorical) pot with the glowing bright-orange safety handle. You know, the one that says “WARNING! This looks like real coffee, smells like real coffee, and (arguably) tastes like real (yeah, real BAD) coffee, but it contains NO CAFFEINE! Drink at your own risk! Do not attempt to drive, operate heavy machinery, or otherwise remain alert after drinking!” I even switched to caffeine-free Diet Coke, and decaf tea. So now my only real source of caffeine is the occasional chocolate chip cookie. I’m not sure how much caffeine lurks in a chocolate chip, but it’s nowhere near what I used to consume…

In case anyone is wondering, I feel fine. Back when I quit, I was feeling terrible. Not exclusively (nor even necessarily) because of caffeine intake, but because I had been travelling a lot, and was just tired and sickly all over. I was starting a two-week stay in Seattle (business trip), and Em suggested I try cutting back to a lighter diet for a while, at least until I felt better. Part of that change was drinking nothing but water, and lots of it. So after a few days, and feeling somewhat better, I decided that I was probably past the worst of whatever caffeine withdrawal symptoms I’d experience, and that it would be interesting to see how much longer I could keep away from it. So here I am. And maybe it was the general malaise I was going through at the time, but I swear I didn’t particularly notice any caffeine withdrawal symptoms. Certainly nothing worthy of an update to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Apparently, cold turkey is NOT the recommended way to drop a caffeine habit, but it worked fine for me.
In other news, Em’s brother Nelson is coming down from Toronto for a visit! He’s arriving tomorrow night, and hanging out for about a week. Then we’re all catching the same (red-eye) flight to Toronto, so Em and I can spend a long (for us) Halloween weekend in town, centered around my niece’s Bat Mitzvah. I’ll try to hook up with some non-family people while in Toronto, but haven’t got any firm plans yet. Family is definitely gonna come first on this trip, and then we’ll try to scrounge up whatever time gets left over. Anyone wanna crash a Bat Mitzvah? Um, no - just kidding.

In geek news, Google has released a beta version of Google Desktop that seems very sweet. Since I spend most of my life inside Microsoft Outlook, I’ve been relying heavily on Lookout (free, and highly recommended for Outlook users), which does many of the same things that Google Desktop does. I expect I’ll be playing with both over the next couple of weeks to try to see how they stack up.

Oh, one more thing. Very sadly, like most bloggers, I get a TON of comment spam on this blog. To cope with the problem, I’ve turned on comment moderation, which means that I have to manually approve every comment that gets submitted before it will actually appear on the site. So if you submit a comment and don’t immediately see it posted on the site, it’s simply (well, probably) because I haven’t approved it yet. I get an e-mail alerting me of each new comment, but the turnaround time between submission and approval will vary. It sucks that I had to do this, but the alternative was for the blog comments to be flooded with porn spam, and spam ads for various medications, all of which I’d then have to manually *delete*. This way, only the non-spam posts ever actually appear on this page. I’m toying with other options, but that’s the way it works for now.

Go Emylene, it’s your birthday, we’re gonna party like it’s your birthday. Okay, so we didn’t party. But we had a really nice dinner at Delfina, which is pretty much Em’s favorite restaurant in this part of the world. At least for now… And she scored some cool loot, too, like a hand-knit scarf, and a custom-made t-shirt (it has a picture of one of the Angry Little Girls - the “Asian” one - with a caption of “Angry Little Canadian”) that’s hella cute. By the way, we both enjoy saying “hella” now. It’s hella fun. You should hella try it.

I got her a Rio Karma, because I think it’s actually cooler (particularly for Windows users like us) than the ubiquitous and wildly revered iPod, but Em wants an iPod, so I’ll be swapping the Karma out for a shiny new iPod tomorrow. And after looking at a few sites like this one, it seems that there are quite a few options out there already for people using iPods with Windows after all. Note that now that she has her very own MP3 player, Emylene has finally promised to learn how to make and manage playlists, which I’ve been bugging her to do for some time. Unfortunately, the ideal Emylene playlist would typically consist of a single track, repeating endlessly - but that’s a topic for another blog entry.

I haven’t posted in a while, but I was mostly just too furious with myself for accidentally OVERWRITING (ie, losing *permanently* - unless someone out there has it cached) my September 27th “Back from LA” post with my (newly re-posted) “Grrr” post. The moral of the story is that you should be careful using cool tools like w.bloggar, and you should NEVER update your blog after turning off your scheduled backup jobs. Boy, am I an idiot. At least I’ve got the backups going again, and promise not to be that careless again. Really.

Phew - bedtime here. Now that I’m done beating myself up for being a blog-idiot, I’ll get back to (cautiously) posting new links. In the meantime, enjoy this - it’s one of the most beautiful toys I’ve ever found on the internet (which is saying a LOT).

I actually *had* a new post about 99% done, but then my notebook froze on me, and I had to power cycle it. And I was composing in w.bloggar, which (while otherwise brilliant) does *not* do Auto-Save. Being the kind of geek who warns others (personally and professionally) about just this sort of thing, I have to just take it on the chin, and remind myself (and others) that the extra 0.3 seconds it takes to hit File->Save every minute or so (wherever Auto-Save isn’t yet an option) can *really* be your friend, and is a discipline *definitely* worth honing.

I’ve still got most of it in my head, but no time right now to re-enter it. Soon, soon. In the meantime, please enjoy this clever piece of political satire. Note that it got here via BoingBoing, requires QuickTime player or equivalent, and is roughly 5 MB.