This is what it generally looks like in front of me while I’m working.

Very exciting. Two monitors. That tends to freak people out. They get dizzy when I start moving things from one monitor to the other. It can be pretty amusing. It’s also a good way to get rid of people I don’t want hovering over my shoulder. It amazes me how most people can’t comprehend the usefulness of having the dual monitor setup. I think most people are comfortable doing the minimum amount of work (there’s that ‘work’ word again) possible. I think they’re comfortable afflicting themselves with Carpal Tunnel Syndrome as well, considering how few people use an ergonomic keyboard these days. I’d be a cripple by now if I hadn’t been using one all these years. I really want to learn the Dvorak Keyboard Layout. Turns out we’re all using an antiquated keyboard layout, one that was intentionally designed to slow us down back in the days when typewriters had all sorts of mechanical stuff going on which wouldn’t work right if you typed too fast.

On the plus side, it is Friday. I’m sitting here trying to digest the liter and a half of water I just drank too fast. It hurts. I’m hoping the bloat subsides within the next hour so I can move towards the door. I might just have to float myself out of here.

It’s yet another Friday. This one finds us at the front end of a heatwave, supposedly. It’s pretty steamy out there right now, at least here at work. I hear the beaches are contaminated. All the rain we had caused some waste runoff. Yet another one of the disadvantages to not living somewhere like, say, Bermuda, not that I’ve ever been there, so I can’t say for sure. I’ll be spending all day tomorrow in my New Agent Orientation class. It’s a requirement for LIBOR membership, which is the local board of realtors. I’m hoping to find out exactly what this all means for me tomorrow. I’m hoping to find out something, anything, to justify my spending all day on a Saturday in some class somewhere I don’t want to be. Plenty of things I’d rather be doing, especially after an extremely busy week at work. I should remind myself that some people actually do this real estate thing full time.

I’m finishing up my water before hitting the road. The metallic taste is still lingering. It’s annoying, but bearable. It might be time to mix things up a bit and start incorporating some iced tea into the agenda.

My home computer is acting up. I had a triple-boot configuration going. I think it proved to be just a little too much at one time. I discussed the situation with my techie friends at work, and they were scratching their heads. I have a way of making them do that. Somehow, I manage to discover new and exciting ways to make computers stop working. At least, I do that to my home computer. I’m pretty good at keeping my computer at work up and running despite endless adversity. The problem is, my home computer is the one I really care about. I’ll obsess over it until I fix it. Until then, it becomes a Zen exercise for me not to allow it to interfere with my life. I didn’t lose sleep over it last night, so there is progress being made. I’m pretty sure I have a corrupt Master Boot Record. Story of my life.

I finally took the plunge and updated to WordPress 2.0, which could not have gone more smoothly. My alterior motive for the update was to try out Canvas, a new plugin/extension for WordPress, and once again, my life has been changed for the better. Canvas is an Ajax/Web 2.0/Whatever-You-Want-To-Call-Web-Applications-These-Days powered interface for fully customizing a WordPress blog. I’ve just barely scratched the surface with it, but already it looks like a killer blog app. Right now I’m thinking any blogger who’s not using WordPress already should switch over immediately and use Canvas. The whole concept just might change web-based Content Management Systems forever. If only Joomla was this intuitive.

I’ve been dealing with large quantities of Access databases. They tend to get bloated with unused space. So, I built this utility which searches folders and subfolders for databases, populates a listbox (with extended multiselect) with the filenames, then uses the Jet database engine to compact the selected files. It shows before and after filesizes. Oh… and it WORKS. (If it doesn’t, please drop me a line with the details.)

Download the zipped file here.

Feel free to let me know if you find this useful, suggest enhancements, tell me to shut up already, etc.