The Visible Woman...January 24, 2001

Maybe I shouldn't read old diaries. I awake in the middle of a dream. The usual business of trying to find your stuff and your friends. And I can't seem to shake the dreaminess of it. The unreal state.

Work. Sigh. Some days are like that. I listen in to an industry conference call. I have a meeting where I'm trying to penetrate a group to figure out what I can do to help them make progress. I try to run some tests for a paper I'm writing. I have to find my setup stuff and struggle with weird results. It's kind of fun, though. Something different.

After work, I check it out. Indeed, Hearts does seem to lock up and then, when the task is killed, the machine goes black. I kill this Attune thing which also showed up on the task list not responding. I boot a few times. It works. Why? I don't know. That program looks for the network as it can be played on the network. Perhaps that has something to do with it. I download new virus protection. I wish I had DSL at Mom's.

They go off to church for a meeting and dinner thing. They are late because I am late coming by. They seem unperturbed. I'm proud of Mom for getting out her book and trying CTRL-ALT-DEL. Cool. Wish she had been successful so she'd try again.

I decide to enter our spending (which we've been carefully tracking on paper) on Excel. I change my mind and decide to put it into Microsoft Money. At first I can't figure out how to do anything. Am I a dunce or what? HELP wants me to watch videos. Finally, I set up a cash account and enter the spending. I used to use money before to balance my checking accounts.

'Jazz' is on again. This one is hard to watch. It has all the facts of Bird's decline. The Clint Eastwood (director/producer) movie 'Bird' is very faithful to the facts and this is familar ground. Wynton is pretty cool, too, talking and imitating all the instruments with his voice, imitating Charlie.

I have a drink of Scotch with the show and read through some of the newspapers.

In bed at midnight, I expect to be up early. It doesn't happen. There doesn't seem to be a relationship between getting to bed and getting up. That's silly. But it seems to be true.