I was at work for 10 hours today doing cabling and other things that need to be done by tomorrow. We didn’t finish, so I’m going in tomorrow morning as well. That actually wasn’t that bad, the work was hard but it needs to be done and it’s not like I’m not getting paid. What really blew though was when I booted up my laptop and it told me “No Operating System Found.” What? Where did it go? What could have happened? Who knows.

On my old laptop I would have just popped the drive out and plugged it into my desktop (I have an adaptor) and seen what was wrong, however a tradeoff of the nice look of this new one is that there seems to be no good way to open it without messing a whole mess of things up. So I’m downloading Knoppix to boot from the CD-ROM and see if I can see what’s up. Honestly I wouldn’t care and just go straight to a recovery CD if it wasn’t for the Vegas pictures that I haven’t uploaded yet that are still on there. I really hope this doesn’t become a recurring issue like the ones I had with the GRX.

On a brighter note, I got my review copy of Andy King’s Web Site Optimization yesterday. I had some time to get started on it and it looks very interesting. I’m going to be doing a review of it for the Web * SIGs here in town and I’ll also post something here. I have to be back at work at 9 tomorrow, which means I have to wake up at 7-ish (hour to get ready, hour to get there) so I better get to bed soon.

Well I just finished up my first day of real work. “Real” in that I went to an office for a set time and worked with other people and I’m going to be getting a paycheck. For years now I’ve worked by myself and for myself, and to be honest I never planned to get a job with a capital J because I didn’t want to be part of that enviroment. This is just a temporary engagement, so I’ll be back to my free-wheelin’ self in a few months, but to be honest I didn’t see this coming.

It was just last week that this offer came my way, and I thought about it quite a bit before accepting it. There are a number of downsides, including that it’s very far away from me (at Veteran’s Memorial and 1960 for you Houston people) and it’s full-time, meaning I don’t have a lot of room for summer things. The time thing was probably the biggest issue, because the oppurtunity cost of relaxation, social time, and other projects is high, but I think it’s going to work out well. The driving doesn’t really bother me because they’re letting me start an hour later so I miss most of the traffic and even though it’s still far away once I get some good music on my stereo I don’t really care anyway.

I don’t really have a formal job description, but from the looks of it I’m going to work on lots of computer troubleshooting issues, their website, some PHP and MySQL backend stuff, and Linux/BSD administration. I was worried about coming in today and I even had the first day jitters when going up to the office, but everyone is really nice and it seems like a great environment. Plus I’ll be working on things I love.

I need to watch what I talk about though, as I found out last night at Diedrich’s with Josh, Julie, Elissa, Ramie, and Chris when I almost put the entire table to sleep by talking about what WordPress is going to do with multimedia in the future. Actually I think Josh was secretly interested but won’t admit it. It’s really interesting, I just need to think of a way to describe it (without showing it) in non-programmer terms.

There are three hundred and seventy-two emails in my two inboxes; with the way I work each represents something I need to do, respond to, tweak, fix, file. I’m going to try and get each inbox (@mullenweg = personal projects, @swcdesign = work) under a hundred messages tonight, though I’m pretty tired.

The tiredness is great though, because it comes from a very active night. Things started at about 5 at The Button. I arrived with the Sarahs and went to see everyone when out of nowhere popped out Julie! How crazy is that? Well, you wouldn’t think it was that crazy unless you thought as I did that she was in New York. The whole gang—Sarah W., Sarah C., Ramie, Julie, Josh, Elissa, and Chris. (Yes that’s pretty much the whole “clique” list which, if you haven’t figured it out yet, is also a pun. :)) So Julie pushed the button (she waited for me!) and then everyone headed to Van Loc for some pho but I actually had to go to Kim Son to meet a client.

I ended up at the wrong one, when he said the Kim Son downtown I assumed it was the one off of Travis where the big Kim Son sign is, but no. There is actually no restruant there, something I found after walking a few blocks to get there. The weather was comfortable though, so it wasn’t that big a deal. I ended up being a few minutes late though (theme of the day) to meet him at the one in midtown, about 10 minutes (drive) away.

David Caceres was going to join us but he couldn’t for some reason, but I have a lesson with him tomorrow so we’ll catch up then. So I ate dinner at Kim Son for my first time. Talking with Woody was great. He was one of my very first clients (two years ago!), and looking back he really took a chance in a way in hiring someone who really didn’t have much experience. Anyway he wants a redesign, and I’m exciting about it because it’s really time for one; the site is starting to show its age. Some things will be trimmed, some things will be added (including a psuedo-blog), and it’s going to look very different. Everything has changed so much in the past two years. Also discussing a redesign with my very first client, whose web page I’m slightly embarassed to link to now. :-p

The all-star big band concert at Moore’s was so good, I’m not even going to try and describe it. Basically it’s the best musicians of every instrument, most seldom seen together because they all lead their own groups. It just blew me away, and I was delighted to see my non-jazz friends were digging it as well. Sarah C. ducked out for the concert and really missed out.

The night wouldn’t have been complete with some pie, so the House of it was. Great fun, chocolate brownie, bavarian banana cream, coconut, peaches, and lots of whipped cream (melt). Also saw Joe and Marcos which was a nice surprise. There are a million pictures on the camera, but Elissa has some up already. All her pictures are going to end up here as she becomes the first official photomatt.net guest photographer. (Inspired of course by Julie’s guest entries.)

Now, I need to go practice.