back to work, back to life

This will be my fourth day of work since coming back.  Ten hour days, mind you.  I came back during one of THOSE weeks, which is preferable to coming back when I have to work at 6am Sunday after waking up at 9am every day for weeks.

Got a headset for my phone at work.  Wow.  I can actually hear callers!  The muffs block out all the superfluous, distracting noise and I can completely ignore my coworkers until I'm done listening to the woes of the user.  It's awesome.  I've found that they even help block out some noise when I'm not on the phone, so I'm trying to get into the habit of leaving them on with the mic up.  I put the mic up so I can feel safe training my coworkers that if it's up, I'm not on the phone and they can approach me without hesitation.  I figure that way, they'll learn to pause themselves if they see it's down.  Not that it'll help with people who call to me over the monitors, but I think it will help some.  I don't want people thinking I leave these on all the time just to make them think I'm on the phone so they'll leave me alone.  It's just so nice to be able to concentrate some!!

Lost my work cell phone, though.  Trying to figure out what happened to it.  I'm 95% certain I left it at work prior to vacation.  I've stopped turning things upside down looking for it.  After the third search, I figure I'm not insane enough to hide it on myself THAT well, and there must have been some third party intereference.  

I hope to attend a vb.net class through work... kept bugging my boss about it and he'd told me I could go once I finished this database to his satisfaction.  I did shortly before I left and wrote him an email, in a sort of BASIC code.  Something like, "DB = COMPLETE.  IF DB = COMPLETE, GOTO VB.NET."  He responded sorta like this and copied our "trainer" on it:  "IF DB = COMPLETE THEN GOTO TRAINER."  The trainer then wrote back to us and said something along the lines of "IF TRAINER HAS INFO THEN GOTO CLASS."  So I found all the class info again and resent it to both of them two days ago.  It's pretty scary when people respond to me in my own language, especially my own boss and someone as no-nonsense as the trainer person.  I almost fell out of my chair laughing when I read their responses.

http://www.ltfvt.com is coming along nicely.  I added a few pages and they look niiiiiiice (IMHO anyway).  LTF folks seem to like them, too.  RapidWeaver ROCKS.  Best website software I ever used.  I thought it would make me code-stupid but I'm actually learning more code and hanging onto a lot of what I already knew.  Go figure.  I get lazier and end up learning more...

Just got the two books I ordered from lulu.com.  They look like slighter-larger-than-usual paperbacks (height mainly).  Not the typical paperbacks I'd expected, but not far from expectations, either.  Nice, though Scott (authour friend who wrote them) didn't do his cover well on the first one and it's grainy.  Obviously blown up to fit the cover (very bad from a computer image perspective).  He fixed it for the second one.  I'll remember not to make his mistake(s) if/when I do one.  Inside, they're much like standard books.  Can't wait to read them, I like his writing.  In case I've not mentioned him yet, his name is Scott Harper.  His site is http://www.lulu.com/sjhlhjh should any of my readers be interested.  The two books I just got are Winter's Rite and Well Wishes.  He also just released Gauntlet.

Well, off to finish updating ltfvt, and then off to work...

~nv