I went in for an endoscopy at Mt. Auburn Hospital this morning. I remember everything up until the point where I was told to lie on my side and the doctor delivered the sedatives, and everything right after I woke up in the recovery area. Everything in between was an eerily missing chunk of my memory, as though I went to sleep right away and woke up naturally and not groggy. Getting off the bed was like standing up suddenly after you've been lying down for a long time.

chenoameg picked me up and drove me home, and I've been sipping ginger ale since (purplerecluse cleverly pointed out its existence). Doctors orders are to make no major decisions until tomorrow, so maybe I won't be able to work on anything meaningful today.

A few minutes ago the phone rang with a prerecorded message about satellite TV. The woman said to press one to talk to a rep, but for fun I hit the pound key, and got a lovely "your number has been removed from our system" message. Whee!

A few weeks ago (when I finally got my room wired up at my new apartment), I booted up my Linux box and started updating Debian. When the dust settled this morning, my font settings had reverted themselves... leaving me with the ugly-beyond-description font families Kochi and Sazanami as the default for Chinese/Japanese characters.

Whose idea was it to have a two-year-old come up with fonts?!! I guess you get what you pay for, since they're open source.

I immediately set out to find something better and decided that, much as I dislike Microsoft typography in general, their Asian fonts are actually pretty decent, so I quickly installed them to save my computer from typographical horror.

Stolen from my LJ friendslist :) I have a LibraryThing account, but I haven't put anything into it really.

These are the top 106 books most often marked as "unread" by LibraryThing's users. Meme directions: bold what you have read, italicize what you started but couldn't/didn't finish, and strike through what you couldn't stand. The numbers after each one are the number of LT users who used the tag of that book.

( The list proper: Ian is not very well read, and might just use it as a future reading list )

Synthesized from puffy_wuffy and remcat:

Instructions:
1. Go to Career Cruising, www.careercruising.com
2. Put in Username: nycareers and Password: landmark
3. Take their "Career Matchmaker" questions at the upper left corner
4. Post the top ten to twenty results
5. If you'd like, put the careers you have seriously considered in bold

My results, which are perhaps not surprising:
1. Computer Support Person
2. Industrial Designer
3. Computer Network Specialist
4. Animator
5. Fashion Designer
6. Video Game Developer
7. Computer Animator
8. Artist
9. Graphic Designer
10. Telephone Operator
( and the next ten )

If you're interested in reading books with slightly snarky folk, come and join my book club :) Our next book is Murphy by Samuel Beckett, and we'll be discussing it on Thursday, September 13 at 6:30pm. We meet at J.M.'s place in the Inman/Central area; I'll give the exact address in a subsequent locked post, or you can comment/send me e-mail for it.

The book club has been shrinking from the vagaries of life (why's everyone graduating and moving out of Boston, anyways? ;) ) so now is the perfect time to join and help shape the club :)

I missed the opening weekend for Spiderman III, so I want to see it tomorrow (Friday) night! 8:15pm showing, Loews Common, meeting at 8pm in the lobby. Anyone interested?

I upgraded to Office 2007 at work this morning and noticed that it uses the new Vista fonts for all its menu and text. My first thought was, "huh, that's kind of neat, they've decided to anti-alias everything and use a reputable font (Frutiger) as their default."

... except then I went looking for Frutiger on my machine and it wasn't there. Instead, there were these two other fonts called Segoe and Segoe UI that bear an uncanny resemblance to Frutiger. Microsoft has done it again--they've ripped off another reputable typeface and replaced it with a sad substitute from Monotype.

Newman's Own just lost major coolness points (!) with me. The letters on their Alphabet Cookies are carved in none other than Arial.

... says Ian, who merrily munches away at the cookies.... damn you Newman's Own!!!

A cute FUDdy e-mail I got from Yahoo! Taiwan this morning (I especially like the little fishing ninja-thief):

Up: Saturday morning, I participated in the Race Up Boston Place climb (thanks to everyone who donated :-). I didn't die and I made it in 7 minutes and 36 seconds! As a special treat, at the top of the climb we were led into an observation room where we could look down and see all of downtown and the waterfront on one side, and the Zakim bridge and Charlestown on the other. That and they had water bottles (I finished mine in a minute) and cough drops (for which my itchy throat was grateful) and chairs (Oh My Gawd my legs were tired). The other people at my company who went also seemed to have a lot of fun.

Down: By the time we were done it was too late for karate, so I hit downtown crossing for some clothes shopping. It was then I started realizing that the world felt too warm and that my nose was starting to run. And while the fever went away, the rest of the symptoms lasted throughout the weekend, so I had to punt my Saturday evening plans :-(

Up: On my way home (before things got worse) I visited Schoenhof's, which has somehow eluded me for all these eight years I've been in the area. Something about the store being closed on Sunday... but anyways, I browsed the Spanish books section and picked up Diarios de motocicleta: Notas de viaje, which I plan on reading with the help of my new "Pocket Edition" dictionary (at 5" wide x 8" high x 2" deep, it's hardly pocket-sized).

Down: My 4-drawer chest lost more of its structural integrity when I tried putting away my loot from Filene's Basement, so I had to make a trip to Tags and replace the cracked plastic corner brackets with metal ones. And now there are a few more holes in the drawers than there used to be.

Up: But on the way back from Tags I stopped by Shaw's and found... Manischewitz Shake n' Bake (well, "Chicken Roasters")! It's dairy-free and I got to play with raw chicken in a plastic bag! And I got 2.5 pounds of collard greens, which after shredding barely fit in my Dutch oven.

Other fun victuals: jadia gave me leftover pan-fried fish (mmmm) and some of her freshly baked fruit and nut bread, and lokiect made lemon souffle.

Up: I finished calculating my taxes.
Down: But I ran out of checks to pay them with. Oops.