Gadget Joy

Today I went to my weekly meeting at the American Tobacco Campus, but I came back to West Campus for lunch. AE wanted to show her friend, DS (many name collisions on these intials lately- I leave distinguishing them as a hopeless exercise for the reader) around Duke. As I mentioned previously, there isn't a lot on campus that is open this week, so we met at Twinnie's. We then carried our stuff back up the hill and ate on the library patio. The weather was perfect.

My parents and I ate at Thai Cafe tonight. It's the time of year when I need to convince restaurants that donating gift certificates to be used as door prizes for the CIT Showcase is good advertising. It is!

When I got home, my Think Outside Stowaway Bluetooth Keyboard was waiting for me. That was very exciting. So far, I am extremely pleased with it. It's lightweight and compact. I downloaded the Treo 650 driver and then I was ready to go. Configuring the secure connection was a little tricky, because I was finally watching the second half of West Side Story and not paying attention to the instructions closely enough. It's a little tricky anyway, because you have to keep putting the keyboard in discovery mode while configuring the passkeys. It is very cool, though. I like the idea of having something that should also work with whatever tablet or phone I get in the future, too, since it uses bluetooth.

Beware of Soup

We had lots of storms last night that resulted in treacherous tornadoes in other parts of the state. I woke up about 3:30 am because of the wind and the downpour. With as many windows as I have and with the vaulted ceilings in the bedroom, a hard rain is quite loud. Whenever I have the worry of severe weather swimming in my mind as I sleep, it's pretty easy for me to wake up. I was eventually conscious enough to get my hand held ham radio on so I could leave it on the fire channel, where I could assume they would warn me if there were an actual tornado warning.

Then at 5:25am, my alarm went off and it was time to test a Blackboard feature that has been failing. I was only slightly more awake than I was when I was unable to use an on/off switch, but it still seemed to go well.

I then had to dash off to the American Tobacco Campus to pick up and be trained to use my procurement card. In all of 20 minutes or so, I learned that I am not allowed to purchase animals. What's the fun of that? Fortunately, I was able to buy a cafe mocha before heading to the office. I used my personal card, of course.

Then then real fun began. After attending a Staff Development Committee meeting, I went to Twinnie's to pick up a small serving of broccoli and cheese soup, to serve as a late lunch. I opened up the lid to the soup container a little soup plopped onto my Goldtouch Ergonomic Keyboard. It wasn't that much, so I immediately shut down the machine and painstakingly took several napkins and soaked up all the liquid. It didn't look as if much had gotten underneath the keys at all and I was able to clean up the tiny spot that had. Whew!

Next I just picked up the soup bowl maybe 1/4 of an inch off my desk and suddenly about three times as much spilled on the keyboard and quite a bit more spilled on my desk. I decided at this point that I 1) was really not having a good day, 2) I was an idiot for having soup anywhere near the keyboard and 3) I was never going to eat something like that at my desk again. It was time to ask PW to come to the rescue and start confessing to my boss and any other passers by what I'd done. It brought back no-so-fond memories of spilling V8 Splash Tropical Blend on one of the Sun keyboards in the Duke Computer Science Majors' Lab (which no longer exists), except this was worse, since it's a fancy keyboard.

I actually ate the soup, which I believed was its intended purpose. I ate it in the kitchen area, too.

The good news is that it seems to be advantageous to have a fancy keyboard. The entire area underneath the keys is sealed, so nothing can get damaged. PW, who cleaned the keyboard up, expected it to be just fine once the keys dried.

After finishing the evening with a nice take-out serving of Kurama sushi, it turned out to be not such a bad day after all.