There is good news and bad news about this weekend.

The good news is that I've had a four-day weekend, as my workplace has been nice enough to give me both monday and tuesday off.

The bad news is that I don't know anyone in Buffalo and all the family and friends I would have spent the time off with are 700 miles away. So the net effect of the break has been close to nil, and I'll probably spend the rest of it bored out of my skull.

However, four days off is too much time to do nothing, so I've tried to make the best of it and turn life's sour milk into life's gourmet cheese. In fact, I've made a list of stuff that I've wanted to accomplish before I have to go back to work on wednesday:

1. Clean the house. And I do mean *all* of it.
2. Do *all* my laundry that's accumulated through procrastination and not having my own washer/dryer.
3. Get more exercise. I need to be more regular about working out when the JCC gym is open, and finding other means of exercise when it's closed.
4. Get a haircut and stop looking like a caveman.
5. Do something for the 4th of July. I don't care what it is, but just something that is interesting, worthwhile and that I can be proud of myself for doing.
6. Work on programming stuff, both for my own projects and for a few things at work.
7. Obtain and drink substantial quantities of Goldschlager.

-- Progress so far...

1. 1 -- I still have yet to do #1; a few passes with the swiffer here and there don't count. As I'm probably not going to have a lot else to do tomorrow, #1 will be the main thing on my dance card.

1. 2 -- has been accomplished, although in a less-than-satisfactory manner. My laundry is all done, but it took me 5+ hours to do it all, and that was with multiple machines at a laundromat. And again, as proof that laundry detergent can be as messy as the messes it's supposed to remove, the cap fell off the bottle and my bed sheets got soaked with Tide. I'm sure they'd really look cool under a blacklight, but they wouldn't be much to sleep on. So I had to run to Target before it closed and blow $70 on 300 thread-count sheets. If things hadn't been so desperate, I'd have found a better deal on 400-count, but I want to be able to go to sleep tonight.

1. 3 -- I did some yesterday. I finally got up the gumption to walk all the way down Richmond from my house to Forest and look at all the beautiful houses along the way. Walking briskly, it only took me 20 minutes, which shocked the heck out of me as I had originally pegged the journey at 40 min. At the destination I rewarded myself by trying out Cole's. The food was good, but the Belgian ale on draft kicked ass; jeez, 8% ABV isn't beer, it's like fortified beer! I then walked/stumbled back home on Elmwood, which brought the round trip to approximately 4 miles.

1. 4 -- Accomplished at Ricci's in Orchard Park. I wanted to go to Chick's just down the street on W. Utica, but that unfortunately closed a week or two ago.

1. 5 -- Hope I don't blow this one. If I do, I guess I can still think positive and do a real kickass job on #1.

Warning: non-English spoken below

1. 6 -- I got a decent amount of programming done. More progress on the bar geocoding project. I wrote a python program that converted converted the list of restaurants (e:zobar) sent me to Google Earth's KML format. For some reason, Google Earth is importing enough so that I see this list of establishments in the sidebar, but the establishments are still not showing up on the map. I choose to blame Google for this, as their XML abilities and design for Google Earth hasn't exactly been up to snuff (insert snippy comment about Google only hiring 4.3GPA computer science grads here, "best and brightest" my ass...).

I also began work on programming my open source PostgreSQL C ocoa framework. I finally downloaded every existing Postgres C ocoa framework in the hope that I can combine the best parts of them into some well-maintained gold-standard that everyone can rely on; right now, there's all these little 'fiefdoms' and the situation really sucks. I wrote the initial resultset and connection API, so I should be able to test the stuff pretty soon.

1. 7 -- I'm really upset with myself that I've been too lazy to run by an open liquor store and pick up some Goldschlager. Hodge's liquor is just up the street, so I really have no excuse. None at all.

Today the HR person from my company called me into their office and told me that after several months of temp-to-hire status where I was the "temp" I am now basically a "hire" once I finish the paperwork.

This is going to be a big load off my mind. It's never easy thinking "what if suddenly find myself unemployed next month", and now I probably won't have to think about that unless I do something really stupid. Getting permanent status is also nice because I've put off so many purchases for so long, trying to save up as much money! as possible for the possibility of not being hired on and having to move back to NC.

I wanted to go to the Layette square concert to commemorate the occasion, but I was feeling so tired I had to pass. But I should definitely find some small way to celebrate this weekend--perhaps I should invest in that bottle of Goldschlager that I was so craving last weekend.

Technical-ese

Tonight I made a big breakthrough in my use of CoreData to build my Cocoa based bulk geocoding app that will let streamline my workflow of converting city commercial establishments into WGS 84 decimal coordinate values.

Plain English:

I'm one step closer to knowing the exact location of every bar in Buffalo and I'm one step closer to improving my pitiful situational awareness that's caused me to miss a lot of cool events. Entering the addresses en-masse and converting them all-at-once will be a lot simpler than locating individual addresses in Google Earth and hitting the "marker" button 500 or so times (once for each bar).

Apparently somone forgot to tell me that in Buffalo when it rains really hard, the roads turn into rivers.

Elmwood was pretty bad. Since my escape route back home was cut off and I was on the north section of Elmwood, I thought that I'd fare better on Sheridan. Since Sheridan's a big, heavily used road I thought that its storm drains would be more effective.

Apparently not.



Yes, those are waves. Lucky for me the moon wasn't out, otherwise I'd never get back home.



It's a bird, it's a SUV, it's a jetski, it's...it's...nope, it's just a SUV.



When roads become rivers, sidewalks become roads. I was not proud of what I did and the grass that I and everyone else in Buffalo ruined. But sometimes ya gotta do what'cha gotta do.

Last night, I was really bored. I don't know anyone in this town, so hanging out with friends wasn't an option. There were no movies playing that I wanted to see save Da Vinci Code, and I'm trying to finish the book before I go see the movie. And I looked over a listing of the day's music acts, and nothing looked very interesting; of course, I don't really know the music scene is like up here and which bands are any good, so I usually look at genre and make my best guess.

By some miracle, I had overlooked English Beat's free concert at Gateway Park (apparently Buffalo has more than just one free concert at Lafeyette Square). After 45 minutes of trying to find the place (and missing the previous band(s), I got to see most of English Beat's main act, which was pretty good and really energetic. I didn't see no rude boys, but quite a few people at the front of the stage were skanking.

Overall, I think I'm proud of myself for not having given into the temptation to either see a lame movie I didn't really want to see or to spend the entire night blasting the ficticious residents of San Andreas.