Two weeks of stultifying boredom, and now I’ve got clients sending me stuff *and* an out-of-house job starting on monday. But, as those of you who’ve been following along for a while might have picked up (yeah, all three of you :-) it’s much better to have me be overworked than bored.

And it’s Harry Potter. I didn’t *want* to like it. Really. I’m still a little bitter over all the fanlove that’s been lavished on it, when I would get nothing but blank stares back when I was reading the Narnia books. But between the first movie (which did not suck) and my old boss (a big fan who insisted on explaining Quidditch one lunch break) I became intrigued in spite of my self.

And then there was the fic. And the *good* recs provided by the likes of Te and others. And I began thinking, hey…. this doesn’t suck at all. And I began pondering the differences between HP and Narnia, and I came up with a big one. According to CS Lewis, magic and wonder are things of childhood that must be left behind when one reaches puberty (I was very attached to the four Pevnise children and was always grumpy that he didn’t stick with them). But in Rowling’s world, magic stays with you however long you wish it to. (Her discription of the Quidditch world cup make me think of a particularly boisterous and off kilter ren faire)

The cat is, right now, sitting quite determindly on top of the pile of classifieds that I brought home. Three attemps at removal have earned me nothing but roproachful looks and a lick on my chin.

So I guess it’s time for me to take a break. Sheesh.

A solution, that is, to my target=”_blank” woes. A nifty little addon to mozilla called MultiZilla. It does *everything* I was wishing for and more. It did require that I upgrade to build 1.2b - I think I can live with that though.

Gah. I may go hunt myself up a 9 to 5 job just to avoid the soul crushing boredom. There’s only so long I can distract myself with housework and sewing projects, after all….

Like a lot of people out there, I use Outlook Express as my mail client. It’s not the best, but it’s free, and more importantly, I’m comfy with it. (People will stick with sub-optimal software just to keep inside their comfort zone. I hate to say it, but I’m no different.) Knowing that it’s not the most secure thing in the world, I try to keep my virus definitions and system updates current. I even staunchly resisted my former boss’s efforts to move me to Outlook - it had way too many features that I didn’t need, didn’t want, and couldn’t get rid of.

Now my big thing is plain text email. I like it. Hell, it’s the reason I’m on mailing lists instead of web based BBS’s. Text is clean, fast, and archives easily. So of course, I had my mail prefs set to only send in plain text regardless of what “rich text” gobbledygook I was replying to. I figured this was pretty good.

Then after my latest update/patch, I found a new option in the settings - “read all mail in plain text”. For roughly a month I have seen no icky html mail at all. Pure, happy text as far as my inbox can see, with a little attachment icon telling me that although some yutz wanted to send me a gussied up “rich text” note; or worse, a full flippin’ web page, I no longer have to deal with it.

Not too bad an idea - wonder how they snuck it past the marketing wanks.

Just when I think Mozilla has taken care of all my pop up woes (and it really has covered 90% of them) I’m reminded that it has yet to come up with a way to do something useful and non window spawning with “target=_blank” links. Currently, whenever I hit a new window spawning link (and if there’s a way to tell if a new window’s gonna happen before you hit the link or look at the source, *I* haven’t found it yet.) I kill the new window and ctrl+click the link to bring the page up in a new tab.

This works, but it’s kludgey. And annoying. What I’d *like* is a way to specify in the preferences (and I’d be willing to hand edit the prefs.js file to get this done) that all “target=_blank” links get opened in a new tab.

Of course, this might cause some confusion if I’m surfing a legitimately frames enabled site, but I’m willing to live with that. Yes, I hate pop ups that frigging much.

Ten hour days will do that to a girl. Seems I work even *harder* when there’s no one on my back.

I didn’t vote this week. Wasn’t horridly surprised by the outcome either. Do I think my vote would have counted? No. Actually, I think the idea that the people have any say in who gets elected is a myth.

On an entirely different note, we’ve got the first seasons of Babylon 5 and Farscape both coming out on DVD, which makes me think of some other series I’d like to see get released. (because I’m finding out that daytime TV really sucks)

Covington Cross
Dark Shadows (The Ben Cross series, not Jon Frid.)
Forever Knight
Friday the 13th: The Series
Monsters
Earth 2
Space: Above and beyond
Vengeance, Inc.
7 Days
Xena

So I set my alarm. On a saturday. So I could get more work done. Thank you thank you mom for drilling that work ethic into me. Seems it’s even more pronounced when I’m working for *me*. I’m also having flashbacks to being in high school and locking myself in my room for hours and hours when I was making an attempt at my own jewelry business.

And the nifty part right now? I’m working and watching Looney Tunes at the same time. Well, listening, at least. So much nicer than top 40.

Less than 24 hours after being fi…. changing my occupational status, I had two new clients ready to send me work. Then I made some calls to former employer numbers one and two and figured that between back pay and untaken vacation pay, I have a whole stinking month of paychecks that are going to be floating out my way.

So I’m going to try this freelancing thing out and see where it takes me. And if the train tracks lead to an icky place? I start mailing out resumes.

I do feel sorry for the clients I was so recently working with though. They’re the ones who’re really going to loose out.