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i met kathleen horton today for lunch at brown sugar down in fenway. kathleen, an occasional reader of my little weblog, thought i'd be a good candidate to interview for her study on how people deal with layoffs, so she contacted me last week about possibly getting together to hear all the gory details. three things compelled me to go: the fact that i love talking about myself, the fact that it'd be one of the rare times when i was actually meeting a fan of the weblog, and the fact that i'd get a free lunch out of the deal. it was 1pm when we got there, the restaurant still packed with the lunchtime crowd. we got a table, ordered our food, and kathleen proceeded to interview me, tape recorder on the table, taking notes (with her hard to read handwriting) while i answered her questions. by the time our main entrees arrived, the interview was nearly over. then's when i got to ask her some questions of my own. i discovered she reads the weblog kind of like why people can't keep away from those reality tv shows, and she'd rather read it than look at the photos, although she noticed that my entries have become increasingly longer since i've been laid off and she sort of skims through the entries. we both thought it'd be cool if somebody came out with a book that collected dotcom layoff experiences. a homeowner as well, we swapped a few renovation battle stories, both agreed that a carpenter is probably the most desireable boyfriend a girl could have, and she told me a secret about how she cleans her place. as for the food, i had the thai red curry, and it was perhaps the best red curry i've had in a long time, i'm definitely coming back to brown sugar again. by the time we left the restaurant, it was nearly empty of patrons, most of the people having left already while we were busy chatting. we exchanged good byes, and i promised to find a good interview candidate or two from my inexhaustible pool of laid off friends.

an hour later i was back at home, a message waiting for me on the answering machine, client crisis with my most recent project upload, but i was able to figure out what was wrong and give them a fix. that's like one of my biggest fears, i step out for a little bit, and all hell's breaking loose and nobody can find me. i watched some television on the couch and fell asleep, waking up when i got a cellphone call from eliza hoover about helping her with some web work. i made dinner, chow fan with green peas with a side of anchovies, finally throwing away last sunday night's hotpot leftover like it was toxic waste (tastes good, but it really smells, i had to dredge most of it and throw it away double baggy style).

around 9pm my father came by to take me back to belmont so i could help him fix his mac palm desktop so it can read chinese text instead of garbling it. i also needed to use the copying machine to copy some documents. after two hours and scouring the internet for the suitable patch and a compatible older version of the palm desktop software, it finally worked. he drove me back home afterwards, mission accomplished.

technical notes: i'm in the process of converting this weblog to something more manageable, something more database driven so that at the end of the month, you don't have to wait forever just to see today's entry because all the entries for a particular month won't be on a single page. also, i just upgraded my webserver account, for $5 more than what i used to pay i now have 500mb worth of storage space. i hope to put up some photo albums in the near future. plus, i think i figured out why my supposedly-stable operating system was crashing (oh, in os x they're called "panics") everytime the computer went to sleep, i think it had something to do with my usb zio! compact flash reader, after disconnecting it my mac no longer try to kill itself when it takes a nap.