Extended weekend

Posted In: Everyday life — March 14, 2005 @ 10:55 pm — Peter

I decided to stay home today when the chest congestion and sore throat didn’t go away over the weekend. To be quite honest, I still don’t feel 100%. I am nervous about taking another day off, since I don’t observe my coworkers doing this to overcome a bout of illness. One the other hand, I don’t want to be “that guy” who comes to work sick and spreads it around the office. For now my plan is to be up and ready for work and if I don’t feel well, I will call in sick again. I didn’t get any flack for taking today off, nor did I expect to… But another day… That might draw comments from some people. Can you tell you that I dwell on rather trivial matters?

Over the weekend, I got an email from my new professor regarding my recently submitted assignment. We turned in paper copies on the first night of class and he requested an electronic version via email too. I submitted a nicely formated PDF export from OpenOffice, which has always satisfied the needs of my past professors. In this instance, I was requested to submit the assignment in Microsoft Word format. My first reaction was annoyance, because he is essentially requiring his students to own a copy of Microsoft Office in order to complete assignments for the class. Despite my best efforts to only use Open Source document publishing tools to complete my master degree, it looks like I’ll have to use the Micorosoft Office export feature of OpenOffice to turn in final drafts for this class. Regis has Microsoft Office loaded on lab computers, so I can’t really say I don’t have access to Microsoft Office. I can’t really give an opinion on the class just yet. So far the course material is quite foreign to me as it is completely nontechnical and very business oriented. I find the text book to be readable and interesting. I’m surprised to see another class with only 6 people in it. It might sound strange, but I liked my first class that had nearly double the students in it.

On Friday evening Stephanie and I went to the Bladium to get some exercise. I met a coworker up there to play some hockey with at the drop in session that was scheduled to be 1.5 hours long. The session got started a bit late, perfect because we arrived a bit late too. It was my first time skating on the sport court surface and I did fairly well. We played some 3 on 2 with a few other people that were up there and tired ourselves out pretty quickly. After an hour passed by I was ready to sit out. My coworker kept egging me on and I managed to drag myself through the rest of the session. Since I had such a great time and I’m certain I will keep up with hockey, I dropped $90 bucks on some gear this weekend. I found some fully synthetic leather gloves on fogdog and ordered some pants and a bag too.

Other eventful things that went on over the weekend were taking our new car to get its features installed. We decided to purchase the security package that includes a Lojack and window engravings. Although our car is not super fancy, it just so happens that the Honda Civic is one of the most stolen cars in the United States. Rather than deal with the hassle of having our car stolen, we figured it would be worth a few extra dollars per month to install some theft prevention gear. This package also came with a clear 3M bra to protect the front end from dings and scratches. Brian gave me a ride to and from the car dealer to get this done. In return I burned him several music CDs. Despite him living so close to us, we don’t see him very often. It was nice to have him come by for a couple hours while I decompressed some MP3s and burned the discs. While over at his place I scored the new Thievery Corporation album. Unfortunately I will have to burn it to audio CD since we don’t have an MP3 capable stereo in our car yet

Last but not least… The chess game between my father and I has ended. As was evident from the very beginning, my Dad won. It took him a surprising amount of moves to seal it up with a checkmate We immediately started a new game, this one has no leader as of yet.