It snowed again. Lots.

And it’s very cold, the Boss emailed with a list of changes (big ones, not little ones… ones that require me to re-paginate the table of contents, among other things… ::giant tears, uncontrollable sobbing::) and while it’s yay! Friday, that means nothing in my world of perpetual work.

Sigh.

But at least there is Leo… what, you mean I haven’t told you about my newest blog love? The Daily Kitten.

Yes, I know it is sick. Shush. It will make you smile.

If it doesn’t, then you’re a cold, heartless sad-sack of a human being. 😛

Aren’t I pleasant this morning?

For obvious reasons (she’s traveling around the world—my dream), I love this blog.

But then she went and posted these monkeys and now I a) feel the need to travel right now and b) want a monkey. Yup.

I don’t even know if I have a response to this: Coca-Cola Blak.

Why can’t it just be Black? I mean come on now.

The coworker and I are staring at the first actual copy of the book. 724 pages of annoyance.

Ironically, the second I opened it at Staples, I found an error. Grrrr.

Even though I know the whole point of the first draft is to find errors and edit it, I forgot an image, so a page is blank, aside from a caption—and I checked for that twice. But nooooo, the moment I open it… boom, first thing I see.

Argh.

There is truly nothing more entertaining than setting your mom up with an email account.

And having her ask, “Now, is that “at” as in “AT” or the “@” sign… as in, hername@gmail.com.

I adore my mom, truly I do and she’s brilliant in so many ways… not, however, when it comes to computers.

I look forward to random emails in the middle of the day now, when she can’t reach me on my cellphone or at work and she’s certain I have been maimed or killed by someone I met online.

Goody, goody… the joy!

(Cousin… email her. No spam or forwards though, lol.) 😉

We are still here—no NYC for us. 🙁 The coworker was cranky, so we went to her favorite place for lunch… the bar.

Yep.

So we went for a drink, ended up having two apiece and not paying for either… because we got an earful from a retired businessman who heard us talking and had to interject (and buy us drinks).

For two hours.

Oh. dear. god.

The coworker and I are supposed to be driving to NYC right now. With a conference tomorrow, we were planning to drive down today, go shopping and have a nice evening. Tomorrow, when she was done, we’d do a bit more shopping, grab dinner and head home late.

Except the conference head cancelled her press credentials—and there aren’t any seats left. So now she’s very pissed and cranky, and I’m sad ’cause I wanted to go shopping. Chinatown people, and Bloomingdales, Sephora, Bang and Olufsen, Prada, Tiffanys… sigh. The not-so-pleasant man (who had already agreed to her credentials) said she could attend the networking reception tomorrow afternoon—but it’s two hours, and roundtrip, the drive is six. We contacted the Boss and are waiting to hear from him… should we go for the reception? Should we ignore it altogether? Can we PLEASE take the day off and go shopping?!

Yeah. Cranky.

On my way home last night, I was listening to an argument on NPR between a guy from Google and an opponent of the new Google Print project. Personally, I’d be a huge fan—to a certain degree.

Granted, I’d prefer to read an actual book—pages, cover, etc. You can’t take a laptop or a blackberry into the bathtub, and a book doesn’t require a power cord nor does it take up a lot of space. However, if Google Print had been around when I was in college, and they had textbooks (current textbooks) online that I could use—without having to spend a ridiculous amount on actual books—that would have saved me a lot of money. And for that, Google Print would be worth its weight in gold.

I do see the flip side—publishers getting stiffed. But I don’t think making all of these books available online would stop the presses—a sizeable number of people would still purchase books, and then there’s the millions of people who don’t have a computer of their own.

The opponent on NPR last night got outrageously cranky and kept going back to Mein Kampf and other censored books, asking how Google would block those from said countries. Obviously Google already blocks censored content from its sites in China and other countries that require it to do so, so why this particular guy went this route is beyond me. Honestly, I think it was beyond the guy from Google, because he kept saying, “We already do that. That’s not a problem for us. We already have to redirect users who want content that’s not allowed in their country.”

One thing that struck me was a statement by the opponent that Mein Kampf was illegal in France and Germany—and neither the Google guy nor the NPR guy corrected him. So I went looking.

Apparently Mein Kampf cannot be printed or sold in Germany (it is banned under a law that prohibits the dissemination of Nazi propaganda), but it can be owned. In 1999, Amazon.com and Barnes & Nobles stopped shipping the book there. Read more here.(On Amazon.de, you can purchase it used, but Amazon won’t ship it—a brilliant way for them to not ship it, but still facilitate in the sale.)

I couldn’t, however, prove that it was illegal to sell in France—at Amazon.fr it simply says that it is “unavailable at this time.”

Anyone know?

It’s remarkable to me that, from 5,000 miles away, the Man can still keep me up past four in the morning.

How, you ask?

Books people, through books. Two boxes full of remarkable little morsels of brilliance—and one in particular, Lucifer’s Hammer. Quite honestly, it’s the most disturbing, and genuinely distressing, book I’ve read in ages—and it was published in ’85. Earth has been basically obliterated by a comet, and a few small pockets of people remain—it only goes into real detail regarding a stronghold in California. It’s a captivating read.

And even though I know I have to be up for work in less than four hours, my head is filled with wondering what would really happened if a comet hit us…

And why on Earth the tenant above me is up and making breakfast at 4:30AM. Sheesh, he’s loud.

I woke up this morning to see we’d had our first snow. Granted, I saw lots of snow last week, but this time it’s at my house. My porch is covered, my Jeep is covered and I’m debating staying home all day—just because, you know. 🙂

I just bought my plane ticket for Hawaii—my credit card is now burgeoning with Christmas charges, so I’m really looking forward to paying that off in the coming months. 😛 But hey, I’m going to spend New Year’s Eve with the man I love in Hawaii… whilst all the rest of you suffer in the cold. Ahem.. sorry! ;P