I had my days mixed up last week. All day Tuesday, I thought it was Wednesday. All day Wednesday, I thought it was Thursday. Needless to say, my meeting was supposed to be Thursday night and Friday was my first day of work. Good thing, too. I got a free day out of the deal. Also, now that I have a 9-5, Monday to Friday job, I might even be able to keep track of what day of the week it is!

I got a job. I start tomorrow. Network and Systems administration for a small software development shop. Sound familiar anyone? Funny enough, much like my interview with my previous employer, I was welcomed to the interview for this job by a big dog. I like that.

In other related, but less humble news, I have actually worked a couple of days for these people already. They brought me in for a 2 day trial. There was another fellow due to come in for 2 days after me, but once I'd been there for a day and a half, they called the other guy and told him not to bother coming in. The position has been filled. Woah.

Anyway, I have a web design contract I have to round out for a client by 7 this eve, so I think I should step off and be productive.

Yesterday Amy and I took a full-day course in Child and Infant CPR from St. John Ambulance. It was pretty interesting, and covered a wide range of topics, since they had to cover the core First Aid topics as well as the more small-person-specific stuff. It seemed to boil down to a couple of simple steps to follow for pretty much any sort of emergency. First, make sure it's safe. Second, send someone for medical help (911). Third, make sure they're breathing. Fourth, make sure they're not bleeding. The instructor had a lot of good stories, and seemed to know her stuff fairly well, which made it easier to learn from her, I think. And I am very glad that I learned the stuff, even though I hope I'll never have to use it.

Well, the doctor took my blood pressure, and it's gone down to 140/85, which is within the normal range, so I won't have to take any medication. Woo. The thing that I'm the most glad about, strangely enough is that I can affect my health by the things I do. It's nice to know that something as simple as working out a little, and not putting salt in the water when I boil pasta means that I don't have to take a pill. Of course, it's also kind of annoying, since now I feel that much more responsible for my health. Oh well, two sides to every coin, I suppose.

So apparently, contrary to what I believed, having the runs can help prevent colon cancer. Unfortunately, this applies only if your tummy troubles are caused by E. coli.

It looks like scientists are finally figuring out what the hell is up with hiccups. As an occasional sufferer it comes as a great relief to know that there's some point to my misery, even if we're not entirely sure what it is yet.

I'm going to the doctor tomorrow. The last time I was there, she told me that my blood pressure was too high, and that she wanted to put me on medication for the rest of my life. (Of course, she didn't phrase it quite that way, but I like to think I've got a certain gift for re-interpretation.) I convinced her that I have the willpower to change my lifestyle, and she agreed that I could try that for a few months and see if it made a difference. Well, my lifestyle has changed. I now get out to the gym three or four days a week, and my salt intake has dropped from its previous high level to something quite low, but I'm not sure if my blood pressure has gone down any. (I took it after my last round of exercising and it was 128/92, which is just over the high end of normal) It doesn't make things any better that I'm starting to stress about the appointment tomorrow, which is sure to drive it up. Well, I guess the only thing to do is go and get it done tomorrow, and live with the consequences. I guess my biggest concern now is whether I'll continue to live this new, healthier lifestyle if it's not making any difference to my health.

So my company is on the virge of getting a bunch of new work, which means that I might be back on client development. But not quite yet, since there is a bunch of framework-ish stuff that I can do before that. A couple of new games, with the necessary changes to the base stuff to support them in as simple a way as possible. But before any of that, I get to make our demo project compile. That was a bigger pain than I thought it would be, since we renamed it from "PhantomGaming" to "PgCasino", necessating wide-sweeping changes in many source files, as well as different settings in the project files. But it compiles now, so in theory, on Monday, I can start implementing the new games. Should be fun.

So, I've just added the capability to update the weblog over the web. Should be a nice feature for those sad days when the SSH daemon dies unexpectedly. And it works fairly well too. I wonder how well it deals with updates? Oh, and I should also make it output the text in a nicer format, but that's all stuff for later. I've also got the XML-RPC interface working, so I can use desktop tools from work to post and modify entries.

I took a few more pictures last weekend, and finally got the time to put them up on the web. Nothing too exciting, I don't think, but they turned out reasonably well. When I convert them to their final web-based format I scale them down so that they're smaller than 800x700. If that's still too large, or too slow, let me know, and I'll see about cutting it back further. When I'm using my laptop (which runs at 1024x768 (Shut up, you!)) I get about 15 pixels worth of scrollbar, but I don't know if that's because of my overly large IE title settings, or if the pictures are actually too large.