~Monday~ I am ready with my thank you to acknowledge the crew at Bruegger’s, so I drove there this morning hoping to find the same manager and most of the same crew working that was there on Thursday when I was treated so well. I went in to scope out the scene. The manager on duty was not the same manager that was there last Thursday, and I only recognized one crew member that was there that day, too. Bummer. I bought a cup of coffee and left.
I had planned on just driving in to work from there, but since I was in and out in less than a minute, I tried to check the whereabouts of the Wolfline bus on my phone, but the GPS app that tracks the buses was down. That’s the first time that that’s happened and it was at a very inopportune time, namely because I needed it.
I drove up Avent Ferry toward Gorman figuring I’d pass the bus if was on that part of the route, and not seeing it, I went ahead and parked on Kaplan, as I saw someone waiting at the stop by Gorman and Kaplan, often a sign that a bus is imminent. Once at the stop, I again checked the GPS app, which once again timed out with no response.
Then I noticed a big coffee spill and stain in the middle of my t-shirt from tipping the cup slightly to see the screen on my phone. Nice.
I walked back to my car, and drove back to my house, where annoyed that it was turning into work to do something nice, I put that troublesome cup of coffee in the fridge to be done with right then and there, and to perhaps enjoy later this evening after work. I took off my white t-shirt, sprayed the hell out of it with a stain remover, and left it in my bathroom sink.
Since it was getting too late to mess with the buses any more, I hopped in my car and drove to work. En route, I passed two people waiting for the bus on Gorman near the Conifer stop, so I pulled over and parked on the side of the street near that stop and walked over to the bus. I was expecting the Wolfline #9 Greek Village bus to come, as both people waiting there were students, but it turned out that the the city bus that also services that stop came next instead, and I hopped on that.
On Hillsborough Street, shortly before my stop, the bus passes one of Raleigh’s oldest college landmarks that’s getting ready to be demolished, and there were three “groupies” sitting out in front of it. A news truck from one of the local news stations was there, and a reporter was interviewing, presumably an owner or manager of the place, in the front entranceway.
I did some editing work this morning, working with a fun colleague, which always makes the task more pleasant. We’re getting ready to notify the users of NC State’s version of GroupWise, which is called WolfWise that we’re about to start enforcing a 25 MB message size limit when sending mail from one WolfWise user to another. The limit used to be 100 MB. This mainly affects a small group of users who send huge attachments via email.
While I was working with Sarah in her office at one point, another colleague of ours came in and they mentioned the Scrabble game they were playing between them, which led to the colleague initiating a game with me on Facebook. Okay, that’s seven potential simultaneous games I have going on now.
In other work highlights, I spent some time doing my status report for last week, and I devised and submitted a proposal to do a presentation at the UNC CAUSE 2011 conference in November in Winston-Salem.
This is one of the many things that I like about LiveJournal (LJ) and why I’m a lifetime permanently paid member of the site. As many of you may know from trying to access this very blog, LJ has been under hacker attack for the past week or so, and there have been numerous outages during that period. To that end, members received this email from them today:
There is a new announcement in ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/newsinfo.gif?v=3){kind=small} news
As many of you are aware, LiveJournal underwent an attack last week which resulted in some downtime and caused other accessibility issues during this time. While the attack is over, some intermittent issues remain which we are in the process of fixing. We want to take this time to let paid members know that we will be extending your paid time by 2 weeks if you had a paid account at any time between July 25th and July 31st. This time will be added to your account a few days from now. Thank you for your continued patience while we get the site back to normal. |
They have done this before, too, and it seems to be totally unsolicited. I think most companies would wait to see if anyone complained, and then compensate only those that did. Time Warner Cable could take a lesson in customer service from these people.
On the bus ride home, the guy sitting next to me had the most ingenious encryption solution on his phone to keep someone next to him from reading his stuff. It was all in Chinese. That ruffled my yenta feathers a tad.
I went to the gym at around 7:00, and I am still shaking my head at a couple of the insane drivers I encountered on the way there, and in the parking lot of the gym. It’s a good thing working out is a stress-reliever, because I needed it.
I skipped the ab work tonight, and did 40 minutes of cardio on the elliptical machine. It was free pizza Monday, so I grabbed two slices of pepperoni on the way out, and at home I sprinkled them with teeny-tiny slices of the smoking red hot pepper my friend and colleague, Sarah, gave me.
I heated up that cup of coffee that was in time-out in my fridge from this morning, and I drank it while I incorporated corrections received from both Ed and Jeff in the minutes from Saturday’s board meeting, and made those available to the rest of the board.
In the U.S. mail today, I received a thank you card from Joe’s sister for the sympathy card I sent her and for the memorial donation I made for their mom. She had underlined most of the words in the card and one of the words in the personal note she’d written inside. In mentioning this to Joe, he said that their mother was an underliner, too. As is my mom, a serious one, which you know if you’re a long time reader of mine.
This made me think about “the rhetoric of underlining,” that is to say, “What contributes to one becoming an underliner, what criteria does one use in determining which words to underline and how many times to underline a word (my mom often underlines words three times), and what communicative purpose underlining serves in the text?”
To say that the results of the search, “rhetorical purpose of underlining in greeting cards,” both in google.com and scholar.google.com left me underwhelmed is an understatement. Obviously, there’s not a huge body of literature on the subject.
Even a more bourgeois search, “Why do people underline words in greeting cards,” failed to add understanding to underlining. Do you underline? Why or why not?