The cold is all gone, but there is lingering tightness in my chest. It's some kind of bronchitis, mild, that won't go away. Well, time ought to fix that.
Yesterday I had a gander at "employee accommodations" on the corporate web site and discovered that I could buy Microsoft Office Professional at a steep, steep discount--so steep that I could afford it--so I went ahead and did it. Now I get to learn how to use Word 2013. Whee!
Pro includes a lot of things I will never use. Hell, Word itself includes a bunch of features I never use. I may have wasted my money on this thing, but since I did not pay very much for it, that's okay; $5 says that the license dies if I go to work for another company, anyway.
Other employee accommodations were less spectacular. I checked them out and was underimpressed. Least impressive was the one that lets only people in certain job centers buy [certain brand] TVs at a discount. The [speaker company] employee accommodation is pretty nice, so if I'm ever in the market for overpriced speakers I know what to do. For the most part, vendor accommodations are usually around 20-30% off whatever the employee pricing is, which is a pretty nice discount. Which is good, because the employee discount on major components is not all that big; it's no secret that TVs and computers and such are all thin-margin items.
Can't give specifics, of course, but what I've said is pretty common knowledge across the retail industry, so I'm not stepping on any toes here.
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The driveway cleared off, as the title of today's post suggests, thanks to 40° temperatures today. If I had been awake I might have dusted off the motorcycles and taken them for a spin around the block, but I wasn't.
It's Januray for another two weeks, then we get February. That was the month that Mom hated the most, and I am coming to understand her thinking. Well, this year we have gotten some snow every week--same as last year--but the snow has been mild and mainly we've just had cold. I guess that's all right; last year I wasn't able to put off using the snowblower until the third week of the month, that's for sure.
Could be worse, right?
So from about halfway through winter it looks as if I was half right--I thought it would be warmer than this--but that's all right.
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Still no sign of a mini-ITX project. The toaster thing has been done, as has the Mac ITX, so those are out.
Well, something will come to me.
I don't know; it seems as if my creativity has been at a low ebb for a little while, and I'm not sure why. The ideas that come to me just kind of lay there and don't do anything for me. When I decide to write something down, it doesn't seem to do all that much.
...probably I have hit the post-holiday doldrums.
Still, ideas continue to percolate, just out of sight. That'll do, for now, I guess.