Too cold to complain

I'm not sure what to blame for my sluggish start this morning--there really wasn't that much calvados in the tea!--but I ended up jogging most of the way in order not to miss the shuttle. Turns out, I shouldn't have bothered, since it wasn't there. After a while, we began to think it was a no-show and pinned our hopes to the next one. But its scheduled time came and passed, and I actually began to think of putting my trust in the CTA instead. Finally, at 9 p.m., a shuttle came by, followed (we later discovered) by another in close succession.

It could've been much worse. All in all, I only stood in the cold for about 25 minutes, and there wasa co-worker with me for company. It was clear and sunny, but the greatest consolation of all was that there was no wind. I'd left in too much of a hurry to put on my headband; later, this became impossible as my wet hair had frozen solid and I couldn't even pull my hood up over my bone-stiff ponytail. So I expected my ears to be worse than they were, but it was my toes suffered the most; I was here an hour before they thawed completely. At least I able to amuse everyone with my Pippi Longstocking impression for the first fifteen minutes or so.

Unfortunately, the bracing effect of all that cold is wearing off and I'm not sure how I'm going to get through the day. I suppose popping outside for an arctic break every half hour or so would help.

The lights are always on in the digital morgue

Today I followed a link from my friend zompist to Joel on Software, an entertaining collection of essays on all aspects of creating and selling software. For whatever reason, most of pieces I ended up reading all dated back to the heady days of the dotcom boom. One concerned a useless contraption called the "Cue Cat", which Joel derides as a harebrained solution to a non-existent problem. ("The number of dumb things going on here exceeds my limited ability to grok all at once.") Out of curiosity, I googled the name of the company to see what had become of it and discovered, to my surprised, a well-preserved ghost site. The film clips are gone, as it the "About" page, but you can still click on "News" to read a stunning series of press releases that culminate with the decision of a major publisher to adopt their technology in April of 2001.