I cancelled my eye appointment for a variety of reasons, the largest being the thought that if I didn't have to wake up, I could sleep. As it turns out, I was right.
A couple things became clear to me at work the other day: 1) there are some people that have no fucking idea how to use Excel in any way and 2) it's scary to think that in some way I might be becoming the firm's de facto programming monkey. Scary because it's not something I'm especially great at or have any real training in and because the firm ought to have some people who are much much more gifted than I. It's an okay change of pace to clean up other people's programming messes, though.
I went to check the TV schedule and Felicity isn't on at any point in the next 2 weeks - possibly ever. I became completely distraught and a little emotional and this probably helped leverage the Bad Guy side of my conscience to a victory over the Sensible and Thoughtful Guy side. I look forward to having a new laptop, though.
Long, but great article about a journalist becoming a car salesman
Warning: poltical stuff follow
I've begun to notice that people who are upset about George Bush often begin their television diatribe with something about corporations. So a simple political indicator - the Google Percentage Index. The formula is: results for ' "candidate's name" corporations ' [or any other word that begins to get on my nerves] / results for "candidate's name"
The Google Percentage Index (GPI) for "corporations"*
Howard Dean - 53,600 / 1,950,000 - 2.95%
John Kerry - 31,500 / 1,580,000 - 1.99%
John Edwards - 22,300 / 1,090,000 - 2.05%
Wesley Clark - 20,900 / 869,000 - 2.41%
Dennis Kucinich - 21,200 / 234,000 - 9.06%
Al Sharpton - 13,700 / 164,000 - 8.35%
I didn't include Bush, because A) the context of the word "corporations" is different in the Republican party's vernacular and B) he's already president, so I reason there's more governmental and foreign web sites that would artificially deflate it. And while there's no reason to actually interpret this, relatively low GPI = less you can associate them/their supporters with diatribes about "corporations", high GPI = more diatribes from their supporters about corporations. For example, Kucinich would like to get rid of NAFTA. It's a Google search. It really doesn't deserve to be talked about anymore than this.
* - Presented in the order I thought of each candidate - I thought of Howard Dean first because a woman on television said "corporations" and she was wearing a Dean shirt. You'll notice it is in decending order for how many results there were for just their name, which is not surprising, I guess. It's also the same order as how much money they have according to this web page today, except for Lyndon Larouche (2,430 / 60,600 = 4.01%), whose platform (as I understand it) is mostly centered around making it more difficult for people to walk from point A to point B throug the use of folding tables and uncomfortably aggressive ideologues, so you wouldn't expect there to be very many web pages (since folding tables don't translate well to the Interweb).
