Downtime Tuesday
It's Downtime Tuesday! They day I have far less to tell you after a long Monday post catching up on the weekend!
As in: I biked home from work. Mad veggie burgers for dinner, and also french fries, the latter of which I was not great at because I had no patience and it took too long. Shobhit and I watched my Netflix DVD copy of WALL-E, one of my favorite Pixar movies but which I had not seen in a long time.
Hey, let's find out how long! *checks Netflix history* Back in the day, in the early years of Netflix Streaming (before they even separated the charges for DVD delivery and streaming, and streaming was just default-included), for a while WALL-E was available streaming. This appears to be the first time, in fact, that I have even watched it on DVD, technically. I last watched the movie, streaming, on August 24, 2009. Nine fucking years! Holy shit, time goes by fast when you start getting old.
I sure do wish it were easier to find information like this on the Netflix website, though. They make it easy with DVD rentals: you go to the "DVD rental activity" link on your Account page, and it shows the latest 100 discs you've received (in my case that stretches back to July 2015). But then there is just one button that says "Show all," and it one single page it shows your entire history. That makes it very easy to do a "search on this page" in your browser to find out when it was you rented something you're sure you've rented before.
I have a history of 989 delivered discs since first signing up for Netflix in December 2004 (initially a six-month membership Christmas gift from Gabriel), by the way. 11 more and I'll be at 1000, over the course of 14 years. That's an average of about 7 per month -- bearing in mind that average was way higher in the first few years, before they introduced streaming options. I even used to track in an Excel spreadsheet (of course I did) how many DVDs I had gotten in a given month and how much it worked out to per disc with the monthly membership fee I was paying. I long ago ditched that spreadsheet after streaming options vastly complicating estimating the value I was getting out of it.
Anyway! It's not so easy to search via the "viewing activity" page of the Account page, which defaults to the latest 20 titles viewed streaming on Netflix, with a "Show More" button at the bottom -- which, once clicked, only shows the next 20 titles -- over, and over again. So I have to scroll, 20 titles at a time, until I get back to, say, fucking 2009 to find out when I last watched WALL-E. I suppose however many thousands of titles have likely been watched could crash the page if they tried to load every single one of them on one page like they do for DVD rentals, but they sure as shit could do better than 20 titles per page -- like, say, 1000 titles per page, which clearly works for the DVD rental history!
Sheeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeesh!
So anyway, then I went back to the bedroom and got ready for bed and was actually in bed shortly after 9:00. I tried to read for a bit, since my library book is a few days overdue and racking up something like a quarter a day in late fees, and the next book I also have checked out is already well over a week into its 3-week checkout window and that one will surely have to be returned late as well. It's a vicious cycle! But as I always say, once I pay off the library late fees I just regard that as my supplemental donations to the Seattle Public Library.
I would have loved to have read more, but you see, I zonked out, much earlier than usual. In fact, I woke up this morning at the time I usually get woken up by the Sleep Cycle app on my phone -- and that was when I realized I actually left my phone charging in the bathroom all night! I never, ever do that. Except I did last night. What the shit? At least my body clock still wakes me up. I'm a little annoyed though that the app will now be missing the data from last night. Damn it!
Good news, you guys!
Back before we moved to this new office location in August 2016, I used to have themed monthly rotating slide shows of photos as my computer screen saver: New Year's Space Needle firewords for January; pictures of myself with Mom or with Sherri for Mother's Day in May; photos of PCC Thanksgiving Feasts over the years for November; etc. Then, around 2016, IT did some tightening of their security or some such shit, and suddenly that's not an option anymore. The best I could do was create a single photo lock screen -- which remains this spectacular April 2016 photo of Shobhit and me on the ferry to Whidbey Island. It's going to take a lot to come up with a photo of the two of us that I love more than that one.
But then, this morning, I was looking over at Scott's computer -- he and I face the same direction, as he's on the other side of Noah's desk from mine -- and I noticed his desktop image was a screenshot. What! How did I not know you can do that!
So, I immediately scrapped my stationery desktop image, and now my beloved monthly themed slide shows have resumed. They switch to new images every minute, and I also kind of love that with the two monitors I use, each one shows a different image of its own. Granted, I don't see it very often as most of the time I have programs open on both monitors, but so what? I'll see something every morning when I turn the computer on. It's currently flipping through select photos of Blue Angels flying for Seafair. That's always been my August theme.
I know you are all extraordinarily relieved for me and I appreciate your support.
I also went through and added select photos to update each month's folder since I hadn't added anything since 2016. One particular month I decided to switch its theme altogether: I used to rotate through just a few generic photos of produce in December for "National Organics Month." Talk about dorky! Why I never thought of this before this morning, I'll never know, but now my September theme is the Washington State Fair. I already had four photo sets from which to nab select photos (from 2009, 2011, 2012 and 2015), and after I go again with Gina and her friend Jennifer on September 13, I'll have a fifth. This yielded far more interesting pictures for that month -- many of them very much "farm themed" in nature so it kind of still dovetails with National Organics Month anyway.
Anyway that was the most exciting thing that's happened to me so far today.
[posted 12:38 pm]