| I started my morning off with a most delightful two-hour walk with @Justis. We hadn’t intended it to be two hours—at least I didn’t, but by the time we walked over to Lake Dam Road, and then around Lake Johnson, and then back down Kaplan, that’s how long it added up to.
Obviously the conversation was good, and easy—or it seems to me, we’d’ve noticed the passing of time along the way, at least I would have. I signed up for two things today, both of them an extended weekend in length, that have potential to put me “outside my comfort zone” for all or some portion of the weekend. |
Though they share this potential quality, they aren’t in any other way related to each other. They are:
- Registered for RTP Startup Weekend, July 11-13, 2008. Potential discomfort: I will be an SFJ in the midst of a bunch of NTPs. [That’s “Myers-Briggs speak.” Layperson translation: I’ll be a details-oriented, more-in-tuned-to-feelings person, who likes closure and thinks in terms of black and white, in the midst of big picture-oriented, more-in-tuned-to-objective-thinking-and-logic people, who like open-endedness and think in terms of shades of gray.]
- Reserved a place at In The Woods Campground to meet my (to-date, virtual) friend and IBM colleague, Steve and his partner, Rich. Potential discomfort: This is a clothing-optional campground, and I have body image issues. [The good news is that it’s no problem to opt to keep one’s own clothes on.]
I worked from home today, and being between edits, I thought I’d take advantage of the opportunity to do some of those, what Covey calls, Quadrant II (Important, but not Urgent) activities. [Other Covey quadrants.]
Also, serendipitously, I received a message from IBM’s MyHelp application that an upgrade was available, after which I was reminded about backing up my system. “Great,” I thought, “I’ll take advantage of this ‘down time’ and do that now.”
One of the things that has has kept me from doing this task was the dilemma about where to store my backup. The tool told me that it detected Tivoli Storage Manager (TSM) on my system, so I could use that to back up my system. “Perfect,” I thought.
I got all the way through Screen 5 of 7, on which I had the option to choose to where to send the data. On a previous screen, it told me that it had detected that I had 17.5 gig of data to back up. The current screen had “CD or DVD drive” defaulted, but also a “Change” button.
I clicked on said button, and an option came up to change it to TSM. Perfect. I did that, and then it asked me for a password to my account on TSM, of which of course I have no idea what it is. I tried my “standard IBM intranet password”—to no avail. If I do have such an account, I’m totally not aware of it.
So, I clicked “Back,” where I returned to the defaulted CD or DVD selection, and when I hit “Continue” on that page, I got this screen:
Needless to say, I don’t have approximately, or even close to, (not to mention exactly), 28 CDs, which is the whole reason I haven’t undertaken this task to-date. And even if I had 5 DVDs, my laptop doesn’t have a DVD-writer. Wasted hour-and-a-half.
I just love Tomato and Rice soup! I had my leftovers of that from a few days ago. I added just a skosh of Romano cheese that I’ve been needing to finish up for a long time, and topped it off lightly with some celery salt. Yum! Yum! Yum!
I did two things tonight that I haven’t done, I’m sure, in over a year:
- Went to Third Place (from about 8:00 until 11:00, where I read 350 pages of Eat, Pray, Love)
- Was disconnected from the Internet for three straight hours when I had perfectly good access to it