dwc

No, He Didn't Hit Me

Probably would've been funny, in a sick sort of way, if he had.

I was just commenting on the insane things some cyclists do…

Notes

Notes from the past few weeks:

1. news.ufl.edu survived a Slashdotting, all thanks to WP-Cache. There was downtime on the Web cluster, but it was unrelated to news.ufl.edu. :-)
2. I've started playing with Catalyst, and it seems pretty nice. I wasn't too keen on learning Ruby just for Rails, and knew that getting support at work would be nearly impossible. If I have my way, all our apps will be written using Catalyst.
3. Work has been getting more and more stressful. With all the energy I've been putting into projects this summer, I was a little overwhelmed when the fall semester started. We are seriously understaffed in the programming "department" (uh, me), but we keep taking on projects…
4. My wrists and fingers have been bothering me more. I'm working long hours, my posture sucks, and I'm not taking enough breaks, so basically I'm hosed.
5. There's some damn convention of Jehovah's Witnesses starting tomorrow, which means parking is going to suck even more. I can't believe what an oversight in planning this was, but whatever. The notices they've been putting on cars claim the conventions will bring approximately "$39 million dollars" (heh…) over the next five years to the local community, so it's not all bad. I guess. They are Jehovah's Witnesses, after all.
6. When driving home today, a cyclist launched himself into traffic. He was probably going 20 or 25 mph by the time his wheels hit 13th Street which, if you remember, does not have a marked bike lane. (Well, it has a faded arrow, but no line.) I happened to be driving the vehicle right next to him. Luckily I had registered his presence on some level before he jumped onto the road, and sort of guessed what he was going to do, but it still freaked me out. I like how if a bike hits your car, there's no insurance on the other side to cover it.

Take me away…

A Plausible Explanation

Nathan mentioned that my problem with lost and later found Netflix DVDs could easily be explained by the fact that 24 is not a series you can start watching in the middle.

His theory is that someone received my discs, watched one of the episodes, became confused, and then rented the first disc to watch the show in order.

At this point, I'd say this is pretty likely.

The only other thing I can come up with is that the mailman saw the envelopes were damaged and dropped them off at the office. Before reporting the DVDs missing to Netflix, however, I went down to the office to check if something like that had happened.

So, yeah.

It Took Me Only a Week to Watch the Whole Season

As I was walking out the door this morning, I found two Netflix envelopes on my doorstep. I thought maybe the mailman was being nice and dropped off my DVDs, since Netflix sent two this week.

Upon closer inspection, I noticed that one of the envelopes was pretty torn up (as in, someone didn't read the instructions on how to open the DVD), and the DVD had come out of its sleeve (but was still in the envelop). The other looked like somone opened it with more care.

The DVDs, as it turns out, were the two I thought were lost in the mail.

I didn't hear a knock on my door. If the DVDs were lost in the mail, and later found, I figured the mailman would put them in my mailbox - not drop them off at my doorstop without so much as a note.

Assuming they were put in the wrong mailbox, why would someone watch the second and third discs of 24 without the first? And why would this person keep them for almost a month?