Things change. Others remain the same.

You won't notice if you're reading this through your own friendspage, but I've just made my first major layout revision over here in ages.  It's actually a less colorful version of the one I've had on my Met page since sometime over the summer. The functionality is similar for ordinary viewing, but it's a lot easier to edit past entries and navigate through things than the other one had been. Comments on the new digs are welcome.

Part of the cleaning process led to at least the temporary retirement of the Avenue Q theming of the main and friends page titles. The new one, which may be the first of a regular rotation, popped into my head last night as I was trying to get to sleep after a rather bad afternoon (just a smidge more about that in a minute). "Instant Insanity" was a 60s mind game put out by Parker Brothers (they of the Monopoly franchise and other lesser games), essentially a four-block ancestor of the Rubiks Cube which drove us all insaner a decade later.  I had one. I learned to solve it. It became part of my traveling bric-a-brac until sometime in the late 80s, and was gone from my home and mind until last night. The internet, of course, will describe the puzzle to the point of your being able to print out constructable cube copies in your own home-

http://www.cs.uidaho.edu/~casey931/puzzle/insane/insane.html

-display them-



-explain their history (they go back to the early 20th century) and provide solutions based on the standard markings-

http://www.geocities.com/jaapsch/puzzles/insanity.htm

-and even provide a Java-based port from which to insane yourself instantly all over again playing the damn thing-

http://users.erols.com/msmammel/markspuz.html.

(No, I have not tried this. Yet.)

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Work progressed fairly normally this week, finishing a few things and making headway on getting some others done. All that optimism, though, came crashing down about 24 hours ago when I got an answer to an email from someone owing money to one of my clients. This person has, at various times, been everything from petulant to genuinely pleasant, and I felt good about having worked out a reasonable compromise of the claim that seemed to make everybody happy. Everyone, that is, except the author of the email, the one who was to pay the settlement, who suddenly and, yes, petulantly, decided that the debt didn't have to be paid after all, go away, and don't let the internet hit you on the way out the door.

Part of the aggravation was financial- I stood to earn a decent fee for ending this ordeal, and the lack of those funds is going to make things tighter, but not too much so- but more of it was just the cold slap of being deceived by someone I tried very hard to keep on an undeserved high road. If my suspicions prove true, I will wind up earning quite a bit more in the long run, and nobody but me is gonna be happy about it then, but I'll know I did my best to be a good person and turned the other cheek, no matter how sore the ass may feel right now.

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Receipt of that email was also the last thing to cross my internet yesterday before the cable and broadband went out for a good four hours. We'd seen cable trucks in the vicinity, so it wasn't a surprise, but it took much work to get the router routing again, work which probably could have been done from the outside box with one flick of a switch. Grrr.

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All in all, though, it could have been worse.

(a) After all, I wasn't the driver of the We-Care ambulance company van which swung from Spindrift onto Main Street yesterday as I was stopped at the red light there. As it rounded the turn, the passenger door swung open and I just prayed there wouldn't be a wheelchair-bound old coot falling out onto the shoulder.

(b) And you can't go wrong ending a day, no matter how bad, watching Spinal Tap and consuming mass quantities of wine and chorklit.

(c) Plus, today has gone much better on various fronts, even this little corner of creative juice here on the web.

Lovely weekends to all.