The problem with sunshine in Seattle

Being the native Seattleite that I am, I, along with my fellow Seattleites, really treasure seeing the sun out and about here in the city. Though we are wrongly accused of being the rainiest city -- Mobile, Alabama, gets this honor, and no Pacific Northwest city shows up until Olympia at No. 24; click here for proof -- it definitely is gray and gloomy for a lot of the year. This means that whenever the sun pops out on a non-summer day, the entire mood of the city lifts, and there's a collective "Ahhhh!" However, the downside is that one then feels a huge amount of pressure to take advantage of the weather, by getting out of the city for a hike, going on a walk, playing tennis, what have you. Sometimes, though, I just want to sit on my living room couch and catch up on "The Wire" or something!

Anyway, this feeling is thankfully alleviated once summer comes around and we have stretches of days of nice weather, but from Sept. to June, after any nice weekend, one can expect questions like "What did you do during the nice weather this weekend" on Mondays..

By the way, on a random aside, I'm watching "The Amazing Race" finale as I type this, and for at least the third time this season, the contestants are in swim suits or something similar (they've also been in leotards and their skivvies). Do they have a waxer on hand for the ladies to use or something?? Certainly, if they ever had a female Indian contestant in the Race, a waxer/threader would get a lot of work..

Black Tuesday

Well, it's tough times here at Microsoft. As was reported in the local news yesterday, Microsoft had another round of layoffs. The last time around (I think January?), our team escaped unscathed. But this time we weren't so lucky, and unfortunately, three of my friends here were let go. Thankfully, all of them have a pragmatic view of the future, and are taking the news very well. I think I'm more bummed than they are!! One of my co-workers even drove to work yesterday instead of busing, just in case he needed to take home his belongings (he didn't -- whew). Anyway, my immediate team and I made it through this round in one piece -- a good thing, since there are only three of us! Hopefully the economy will continue to slowly improve, so we won't have to go through this again. I was a bundle of nerves all day yesterday, as were a lot of people on my hallway. Now that we're on the other side of things, I may need to go get some bubble tea tonight just to help myself recover!!

Online-stalking frustration

Argh, I'm trying to get the scoop on someone on whom I have a mini-crush, but he's nowhere to be found online! I don't get how in 2009, there are still people who are basically invisible to Google -- they don't belong to any social-networking sites, don't have a personal Web site or blog (the former is understandable, though; not many people do) or have never been mentioned in an article or piece that's been put online. I mean, there's an article that mentions me in it that's from my senior year of high school, which was like 13 years ago!!

Anyway, I periodically waste time Googling people I know or used to know to see what they're up to, and usually I can make some sort of headway, but this one person.. nada!

New baby No. 2

Finally got my new laptop, and she's beautiful! When I was researching what to get and settled on Sony, it was quite a nice bonus to discover that I could get the laptop in one of my favorite colors, a dark red -- at no additional cost! It's probably the second "cutest" thing I own next to Buster, seen here checking out his competition:

One of the main reasons I went with this VAIO -- on top of brand loyalty and trust with/in Sony -- was for the keyboard. The keys are spaced apart a bit like on a Mac laptop, which makes typing much more comfortable for me with my man hands.

When the IT guy came in to set everything up for me, I had him go ahead and install the Windows7 Beta on it so I could give 'er a whirl. I've hardly used Vista (due to lack of compatibility testing/support between our tools and Vista, we were told to stick to XP), so I can't really compare it to that, but compared to XP, anyway, I'm really liking 7. It's very slick and sharp, and has a lot of cool new features. Definitely helps that my new machine is rocking 4 gigs of RAM!

One (other) big downside of my old laptop spontaneously dying is that I had to wipe all the music off my iPhone to re-sync it with the iTunes on this new computer. Had I known my old laptop was about to bite it, I would've backed up all the music and then deauthorized that iTunes, but alas, I had no warning. Most of the music was duplicated on my iPod, but I unfortunately had a couple albums I'd bought off Amazon that I'd stored only on my dead laptop and my iPhone. So I'll have to shell out again for those.

Finally, one other cool new thing I've figured out how to do -- transfer TV shows from my TiVo to my laptop to my iPhone. As I ride the bus a lot, it's going to be so great to be able to spend the morning commute watching last night's "Rescue Me," "Real Housewives" or whatever. It took me several hours to figure out the whole process (getting files from my TiVo to the laptop was easy -- but time consuming -- using TiVo Desktop; then I had to use two additional programs to convert those files for viewing on the iPhone), but figure it out I did!