I met Kevin (av8rdude), Dave/Jayce, and Kevin’s friend Greg from DC at Finch’s for breakfast. I was surprised to find the place not jammed for Mother’s Day.
Perhaps the moms were taken to someplace a little more upscale (which, honestly, wouldn’t take much) for their special day.
From there, I went to D.H. Hill Library (NC State University’s library) to have some quiet time and space to focus on my editing, which needed a lot of focus today.
First, I was turned down to check out a key to one of the Graduate Study Rooms, because my student ID has expired. Even though my computer system user ID is valid until May 30th, my library privileges have been discontinued. Deity forbid we should encourage reading!
On the way to find a quiet place from which to work (which you wouldn’t think would be hard to do in a library, but with cell phones in the hands of the Partial Attention Generation, it’s harder than you’d think), I stopped by circulation to see if there were any (free) student tickets available for Cokie Roberts’ Ladies of Liberty reading at the McKimmon Center next Friday. Struck out on that, too. You’ve got to get them from the Friends of the Library office, which is only open 8-5, M-F.
I found the coolest area of the library, which I never saw the entire four years I was there working on my graduate degree, though it may be new. It’s a section with several different kinds of very modern-looking setups to accommodate different kinds of personal space preferences, as well as several areas to facilitate small group meetings, with a whiteboard available, for instance.
Just beyond that, I came to the Special Collections Reading Room, which had an explicit statement about the area being a quiet area for reading and research work. Since school is out, the whole library was pretty empty, and there were only two other people in this room, which was quite a large room. Not ten minutes after being in there, one of the other two people took a cell phone call in there.
After catching up my blog, I edited for about an hour-and-a-half there.
This is so wrong, but since I mentioned the story in a recent posting, it’s fair game.
On the way home, I stopped at the Blockbuster closet closest to my house to activate my free one-year subscription to their “Blockbuster Rewards” program, compliments of the online surveys I do regularly to accumulate cash with which I can buy things such as this.
The cashier was very nice, knew her stuff, but talked so fast and used terminology such as “any DVD from the floor” two or three times before I said, “Aren’t all the DVDs on racks?”
This program comes with a few “features,” but I’m only interested in one of them: A coupon for one free movie rental every month.
However, she was more interested in explaining the other features about renting five movies a month to get another one free (which I would never do—I don’t think I rented five movies in all of last year, much less in a month), and that if I rent a movie or game on Monday through Wednesday I get another one free, on the spot.
Okay, here’s the deal: I’m all about free. I don’t want to buy anything to get one free. I want only what’s free out of this program. That’s why I got it.
By the way, “on the floor” means not along the walls, which is where all of the recently-released movies are. I remember reading a complaint about this program being that you can’t get recently-released movies for free with it. However, I rarely, if ever, see mainstream movies, so all of the ones I’m interested in are “on the floor” anyway, so it’ll be perfect for me.
I am also one of these people who have zero interest in being the first to see something. I am happy to wait to see something until it’s at the $1.50 movie theater (which happens to be within about a mile of my house), or until it’s available to rent when it moves from the recently-released walls to “the floor.”
I left there with a free copy of The Shipping News, which I know didn’t get very good reviews, but it’s the movie of the book I just read (or more accurately, didn’t finish reading) in my book club. I am curious to see what happens, but not interested enough to actually read the rest of the thing.
I edited all night tonight. I made good progress, but didn’t finish. 
Stamps go up yet again tomorrow, and you’ll once again be tempted to buy those forever stamps. Should you? Absolutely not! Here’s why: http://odeo.com/audio/12806473/view